Educated

Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in an isolated family where she was kept out of school, before leaving home at sixteen and pursuing an education of her own. Through her experience, Westover explores how learning can challenge inherited beliefs and provide a route towards independence and self-definition.

• Topics: Family; education; abuse; religion; identity
• Perspective: First-person lived experience
• Reading experience: Vivid, clear and novelistic

About the book
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never taken to a doctor and did not have a birth certificate until she was nine.

As she gets older, the influence of her father’s radical beliefs and the violence of an older brother increasingly shape her life. Leaving home opens up a world beyond the one she has known and begins a difficult process of questioning her upbringing, reconsidering her relationships and learning to see her past from a new perspective.

Westover writes with particular care about memory, acknowledging differing recollections and drawing on journals, emails and the accounts of family members. The result is both the story of a life transformed and an examination of what it can mean to develop a voice and understanding separate from those you grew up with.

Comparable books
If you’re looking for books similar to Educated, these memoirs also explore restrictive or unstable childhoods, family relationships and the process of building a life beyond the circumstances in which you were raised, with different emphases on learning, poverty and isolation.

• Learning to Think by Tracy King: Like Educated, this memoir connects a difficult childhood, controlling religious beliefs and family trauma with education and the process of questioning what you have been taught. King’s story places particular emphasis on hardship, learning and finding a way to break free.
• Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan: O’Sullivan also traces a journey from a profoundly difficult upbringing towards education and academia. Her memoir focuses more specifically on severe poverty, homelessness and the role that teachers and mentors can play in opening up new possibilities.
• The Girl in the Shadows by Katy Morgan-Davies: Both memoirs examine isolation under an authoritarian father and the difficult transition towards freedom and a wider world. Morgan-Davies’s story centres on escaping the closed community controlled by her cult-leader father at the age of thirty, with education forming part of the life she begins afterwards.