For fans of:
Jeanette Walls
Survivalist stories
Autobiographies
“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
Born in the rural Idaho mountains to a survivalist family, Tara Westover, author of the critically-acclaimed memoir Educated, is still not sure of her actual birthday. Later in life, she would decide on a date, using her best guess after talking with her mother and grandmother about which day they each thought it was.
Never having visited a hospital, even when she would get injured hauling scrap in her father’s junkyard, Tara owned no birth certificate. The youngest of 7, she would grow up like each of the siblings had before her: working for her father in the yard and helping her mother make tinctures for homemade herbal remedies. Her father, an undiagnosed bipolar, had grandiose ideas about “the Feds”, the Illuminati, and the public-school system, which kept her from experiencing the “normal” childhood most children in America grow up knowing.
“I love my parents. I believe they’re good people. But I think the tragedy here isn’t that bad people do bad things. I think the tragedy is what good people do to keep secrets.” (CBS This Morning interview)
Now that you have some backstory, let’s cut to the chase. Educated is Tara’s first book and it’s brilliant. Everybody. needs. to. read. this. book.
For the first time in a long time, I physically couldn’t put down a book down. The chapters, each told in little snapshots in which Tara moves back and forth between the past and present-day, flew by so fast I finished the book in less than a week. At about 330 pages, it reads like a series of short stories strung together by beautifully descriptive writing that offers more than a peek inside Tara’s mind. She leaves little to the imagination.
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.”
Focusing on the theme of family more than any other, Educated also touches on friendship, loyalty, mental illness, and Mormonism.
Deciding to attend university at the age of 17, Tara gets into college entirely self-taught and eventually makes it to Cambridge in England.
After a series of trips home, physical and psychological abuse, mental breakdowns, encouraging professors, and more, Tara manages to find her own self-worth both because of and in spite of her upbringing.
“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”
I believe Tara Westover is the next Jeanette Walls. Crossing my fingers for a movie deal soon.
Happy reading 🙂
BrandieReadsBooks 