Educated: A Memoir

I think I'm probably the last person in American who hasn't read this book. I avoided it for a long time because I thought it was going to be one of those “look how I pulled myself up by my bootstraps despite my difficult childhood, you can do it too” memoirs. But it was much more nuanced and thoughtful than that. It has so much to say about memory, the primal strength of family ties and how we develop our sense of self independent of them. It's not amazing to me that a woman who had no formal schooling earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, but it's incredible to me that a woman who was so indoctrinated by her parents' beliefs and so traumatized by her brother's abuse was able to build any kind of functional life outside of their influence. If there are indeed other people who missed the huge buzz around this book when it was first published in 2018, go read it now!