Educated: A Memoir

The youngest of seven, raised by a bipolar, end-of-the-world prepper father and a magic hands, unlicensed midwife mother, Tara Westover managed to escape her fundamental Mormon upbringing to eventually gain a PhD at Cambridge. Achievement enough, but still in her twenties Westover would go on to write this compelling memoir of her life.

Frankly it's a wonder she made it out alive. Over the course of her story, siblings are skewered, brained, set ablaze and lose fingers. Her mother clearly suffers brain damage from a car accident and Tara herself is nearly crushed by scrap metal and barely manages to escape a perilous situation with a wild horse. Add to that the looming threat of her abusive older brother and it at times reads like a page turning thriller.

Westover is a compelling chronicler, helped no doubt by her Cambridge thesis on histiography, the study not of history by historians. How they, like her, had to come to terms with their own biases, ignorance and partiality to recreate a world. She's careful to admit memory is malleable and often calls on her siblings who she is on speaking terms with to corroborate her story. The circumstances of her homeschooling to higher education would be story enough but Westover proves herself a talented writer here.

It's a fantastic read that I also reviewed here: https://youtu.be/QY_lsblsRoM