Educated
2018
- subculture
- home schooling
- family
- anecdotes
- victims of family violence
- women college students
- christian biography
- rural conditions
- survivalism
- biography
The story
*Educated* is a 2018 memoir by the American author Tara Westover. Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education in enlarging her world. She details her journey from her isolated life in the mountains of Idaho to completing a PhD program in history at Cambridge University. She started college at the age of 17 having had no formal education. She explores her struggle to reconcile her desire to learn with the world she inhabited with her father.
What it’s like
Cold, open mountain light and the hard, bare sensory world of a rural Idaho junkyard giving way to the fluorescent corridors of a university campus: this memoir's prose is plain, clear and unshowy, written in a first-person voice that notices small domestic details and the body's reactions with unflinching precision. Its mood is watchful and tense, a slow-burning unease that shifts toward a hard-won, bruised hope. The pacing is steady and reflective, with long stretches of ordinary family life broken by sudden, sharp turns, so it reads best in uninterrupted sittings rather than as background company. The emotional register is grave and searching, following a young woman learning to see her own family clearly and to build a self apart from it. Intensity is significant: there is recurring physical violence within the family, including a brother's abuse and a father's rages, described directly though without gore, and the threat of injury hangs over many scenes, so this is heavy rather than gentle. It suits readers who want a serious, intimate account of self-invention, of learning and leaving home, and of the costs of loyalty, and it will rarely serve anyone seeking comfort or lightness.
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