Educated

Educated is Tara Westover's 2018 memoir, the PEN/Bingham winner and the breakout memoir that became one of the most-discussed nonfiction books of the late 2010s. Westover, the youngest of seven children, grew up in the mountains outside Buck's Peak, Idaho, in a Mormon survivalist family that kept her out of formal school until she was seventeen, did not register her birth with the state for the first nine years of her life, and treated medical care as a betrayal of religious principle. The memoir is the story of her self-education through what she taught herself from her brother's discarded textbooks, her admission to Brigham Young University, her subsequent doctoral work at Cambridge, and her gradual estrangement from her parents.

What lifts Educated above the genre of dramatic-childhood memoir is Westover's discipline as a historian (she trained at Cambridge under David Runciman and finished her PhD on the historiography of the family) and her refusal to write the book as either redemption narrative or polemic against her parents. The chapters about her older brother Shawn's violence are some of the most carefully constructed prose about familial abuse in contemporary memoir. The Cambridge chapters in the final third are some of the strongest contemporary writing about the experience of late academic mobility. The framing question (what do you owe a family who has actively prevented you from becoming who you are) is rendered without moral pre-resolution.

Recommended as required contemporary American memoir reading, as the right starting point for the book-club conversation around late-2010s memoir, and for fans of Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. The Julia Whelan audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.