Educated
Tara Westover, 2018
A girl grows up without school or doctors on an Idaho mountain, then teaches herself enough to leave—and has to decide what leaving costs. Plainspoken, curious, and often tense, it moves through memory with the steady urgency of someone trying to understand her own life.
Feels like curiosity, hope and unease. About identity, family and freedom.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs about education, family loyalty, and the slow work of forming a self. Some stretches dwell on family conflict and self-reckoning, so it can feel heavy rather than brisk.
Why read it
It shows how curiosity and books can open a door, and how opening one can complicate your ties to home.
A page from the book
What an apology can build after it has arrived too late.
You were my child. I should have protected you.I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time. Tara Westover.Tara Westover first sat in a classroom at seventeen; she later earned a PhD in history at Cambridge.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Educated for me?
- You may like it if you are drawn to memoirs about education, family loyalty, and the slow work of forming a self. Some stretches dwell on family conflict and self-reckoning, so it can feel heavy rather than brisk.
- What is Educated like?
- Plainspoken, curious, and often tense, it moves through memory with the steady urgency of someone trying to understand her own life. Feels like curiosity, hope and unease. About identity, family and freedom.
- What should I read after Educated?
- If you liked Educated, try I Am Malala (Malala Yousafzai), I'm Glad My Mom Died (Jennette McCurdy) and Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Peter Kropotkin).
A taste of the feed
The kind of power that never gets called power.
Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don’t think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.
I Am Malala · Malala Yousafzai
What the anger is doing for you, and what it spares you.
I’m becoming an angry person with no tolerance for anyone. I’m aware of this shift and yet have no desire to change it. If anything, I want it. It’s armor. It’s easier to be angry than to feel to pain underneath it.
I'm Glad My Mom Died · Jennette McCurdy
The cost, in someone else's bread, of a life of the mind.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody’s mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Peter Kropotkin
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