Educated: A Memoir

I just read a chapter of this in the store and now I have to read it right now immediately

Read with my mom <3
we have differing tastes, but we both agree that this book is great!

I don't know why I read these type of books. I'm glad she got out and got help, but so many people live like this and need help it annoys me to read about it. I always get sucked in by the blurbs and then get annoyed by the content. That's not to say she's a bad writer. Not at all, her writing is great, very lyrical, I found a lot of quotes. I just don't don't want to read about terrible lives.

Many instances in this series of disasters boil down to common sense and safety. While her father's bi-polar disorder coupled with his survivalist tendencies contributed to not only mental abuse - mental neglect? – it also led to him to not educate his family on ideas of simple safety. He placed productivity and preparedness ahead of valuing his family and children.

I grew up on a farm where we operated and maintained many dangerous pieces of equipment. Swathers, combines, choppers, blowers, PTO shafts spinning, hydraulic lines pumping and squidging, snow mobiles, 500 gallon fuel storage units on-site, welders, acetylene torches, electric fences, augurs, elevators, poisonous herbicides, livestock capable of trampling, cultivators, feed grinders, 80' silo ladders, grain bin vacuums, and so on. Before any of us kids were allowed to touch, mount, drive, or operate ANY of it, we were carefully trained, and taught to listen and learn as grandpa Vernor, uncle Freeman, older cousin Randy, and even cousin Nancy taught us their proper use and operation, and warned us of every way something could go wrong that would put us in danger or cause a costly breakdown. Reading this book has caused me to look back on my farm days with a new appreciation for my family.

3.5, the triumphant ending really saved it for me. I can only read about horrifying injuries for so long

I-I-I am speechless. I lost track of how many times my jaw dropped after 10 times. I agree with Cindy's and Katie's reviews. Tara's family in the book is trash.

Cindy's: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2439678349

Katie's: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3528608055

I have a weird theory that Tara's parents are founders of the Essential Oil company called Young Living. I never use their products but I looked up their “About us” The owners are from Idaho.....so it's either a coincidence or it's them.

https://www.youngliving.com/us/en/company/our-founders

So, I googled more, and dang! They are Mormons.

Link: https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/internet/essential-oils-mlm-allege-satanic#:~:text=Young%20Life%2C%20founded%20by%20D,this%20fallout%20began%20last%20August.

Link 2: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemcneal/young-living-essential-oils-satanic


I'm just sayin' hahaha It's most likely a coincidence but this book was a rollercoaster of emotions and it's a memoir.

I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her.

finished this during work and declined calls for the next 20 minutes bc i couldn't stop crying. eugghhh

It was hard to get through the first half of this book. The last few chapters made up for it.

একটা মরমন ফেমেলির মেয়ের পড়াশোনা নিয়ে বইটি। তার ভাই সন দুইটা এক্সিডেন্ট করে প্রায় মরতে মরতে বেঁচে উঠে। তার মা ছিল ধাত্রী। টায়লর ভাই ছিল. তার মা কার এক্সিডেন করে। তার বাবা থার্ড ডিগ্রি বার্নের শিকার হয়। টারা ক্যাম্ব্রিজ পড়তে যায়। তার হোমস্কুলিং হয়। পরে পিএইচডি করে। অড্রি তার বোন।
কিওয়ার্ড
- অপ্রেশন
- ফেমিনিজম
- কনফ্লিক্ট
- এডুকেশন
- রিলিজিয়ন
- বিলিফ
- ফেমেলি

This was a well-written memoir. I appreciated the honesty and depth of the author—I trusted her, which I find hard to do with most memoirists at this point.

I appreciated that there was no tidy bow on this story.

This is a deeply upsetting memoir of growing up in the home of a fundamentalist prepper. The numerous tales of abuse and injury inflicted on children made me physically ill.

Raw, deep, and engaging. One of the best books I read this year.

4.5, riveting and very well written. I felt like she had too many revelations (“at that moment I realised.....”) but then again it is her life.

I've been recommending this book to everyone so 5/5

I listened to this book when I realized I wanted to go to university again and learn something new. This time with intention and curiosity, not just to get a job. All I was expecting from this book was to hear how important education is, but instead, I got to know this incredible girl who had the courage to break free of the shackles of radical culture and beliefs and made an admirable woman out of herself. She doesn't accuse but delicately shows us through her lens how debilitating authoritarian parenting and upbringing can be.

My takeaway:
Education is not about learning the truth, education is about learning different narratives of the same truth and finding your own narrative.

Awesome, sometimes heartbreaking, story. Extremally relatable and shows the undeniable need for education.

Typically I don't read memoirs or autobiographies, but after reading Crying in H Mart, I had this on my list to read next. Wow! What a great book. Tara has a way of writing that makes it hard to stop. I definitely could feel her emotions and how she evolved through her time in school. It's also crazy to believe the experiences she was a part of and how that shaped her life. Definitely a solid book and easy to read, despite it being on the longer side.

This was an absorbing, accessible, inspiring, and disturbing book. It was a very quick read; I finished it in three days. This is a point in its favour, for me; it was so engrossing that it was effectively a page-turner. I didn't know it had been recommended by Michelle Obama or Oprah or whoever else until I came to review it here; I found it on a friend's bookshelf while housesitting and picked it up by chance.

As with many memoirs that include elements of abuse, and lifestyle choices that some readers are incapable of comprehending or accepting, there are those (well-represented in the reviews here) who doubt Westover's narrative and suspect that she embellished or invented this story. It's true that there are known cases of putative memoirs that turned out to be made up out of whole cloth. We really have no way of knowing how much (if any) of this story is true, but the fact is that all of it is plausible. Some readers are incapable of understanding that there are communities whose mores and norms diverge sharply from theirs; perhaps they are especially disturbed by some details and prefer to indulge their doubts rather than accept that in some communities, in some families, truly horrific abuse occurs. We see this in some fundamentalist religious communities, and in many cults; it shouldn't surprise anyone at this point that things like this happen. Just because most religious people – even very conservative religious people – don't experience of perpetrate abuses of this nature or degree doesn't mean they don't nevertheless happen: we have only to look at the example of the FLDS Mormon church, the Lev Tahor sect of Haredi Judaism (a tiny sect repudiated by virtually all other Jews), the experience of women and children involved in ISIS, Al-Shabaab, or Boko Haram, and so on. Even outside of religious fundamentalism, the kinds of emotional abuse and manipulation that are depicted in this story happen more often that we'd like to think. The question “why do abused women return to their husbands?” comes to mind; the psychology of people who have endured abuse of this kind is complex, but very real. I've seen it.

Again, there is simply no way of validating the veracity of this story; given that I have no evidence to disprove it, I choose to believe it. Ultimately I found it a very moving story and an engaging read. Westover is truly a very good writer, with some of the best prose I've read recently. If you like this sort of fast-moving melodrama, you will enjoy this book. Don't read it if you are inclined to doubt survivors of abuse and pick apart their testimonies, because the book will likely aggravate you.

Wow!

What a fascinating peek into the lives of a family so different than anything I've ever known. I couldn't believe some of the stories from Tara's childhood, or the way her parents and siblings reacted to what was happening, specifically with all the injuries. It's just crazy to think how different peoples lives can be from your own, especially when you you're not that far apart geographically.

My favorite thing about this book is that Tara never once tells you what to think. She'll tell you a crazy story, but she never actually says “this is crazy, right!?” It's pretty much just, these are the facts of how I grew up and got an education, make of it what you will. In writing her story this way, she allows the people in her family to be whole, complex characters with both good and bad qualities, instead of just being labeled the villain, crazy, etc.

It's also strange to think that this story isn't technically over. I feel like I need to keep up with the author's life out side of the book to see how things with her family play out.

What a memoir! You run across people in your life who don't know “things”... standard things that you learn in the normal course of growing up, without actually being taught. You wonder how that happned. Now I know!

Tara knew a lot of things with regard to living and surviving on her mountain, but after leaving the mountain, her lack of education regarding anything outside of that mountain, or anything outside of what her father would allow was mind-blowing.

A gripping tale of love and scorn, violence and control, and eventual freedom. The story I was expecting (I'm not sure what I expected, to be honest), but it was an amazing story none-the-less.

Astonishing piece of writing about a completely unbelievable upbringing. Westover is a remarkable storyteller who paints such a vivid, horrifically real picture of her life so far. This is one of those books that will sit with me for quite a long time after finishing it.

Educated is so truly bizarre that it reads like fiction. I borrowed this book from my husband's coworker. She told me to read the synopsis and when I did, it sounded like a VC Andrew's novel. I've seen people raving about how good this memoir is, but I was still blown away. It's a memoir of mental illness, abuse, family, paranoia, the importance of education, and did I mention abuse? Yikes.

I couldn't put it down. I was so absorbed in her world that when someone started talking to me in real life, I had a full five seconds of confusion about where I was and who I was. That's how riveting Tara's writing is. I was absolutely drawn in to her surroundings, her emotions. It's heart wrenching. It's also such an incredible story of the absolute necessity of education. Something said near the end really hit hard for me. To paraphrase, the difference between the siblings who left the mountain (and the delusion) and who stayed was an education.

I loved this. It is the type of story that has to be true. This is precisely why I love memoirs: only the truth can behave this way. Heartbreaking, confusing, inspiring, and devastating.

Great story about growing up against the odds and the power of educate to lift people out of life's misfortunes.

This was excellent. Westover has a strong narrative voice that grips the reader from the first sentence.

A friend recommended this book to me because she was fascinated by Westover's ability to overcome her lack of primary and secondary education to earn a PhD from Cambridge. Thus, I went into this expecting to be intrigued by Westover's survivalist upbringing. While that part was certainly interesting, I think the most potent aspect of the book, is Westover's portrayal of abuse and the ways in which families often protect abusers in the name of ‘family loyalty'. Something I found powerful about her portrayal of Shawn's abuse, were the tender moments interspersed between the more brutal ones. Even though I hated Shawn, there were times I had to remind myself that he was horrible and whatever niceness he was showing Tara at the moment could disappear at the drop of a hat. Despite familial neglect and abuse, Westover portrays her parents and siblings in a nuanced, balanced manner. Nobody is all good or all bad. But she does not make any excuses for their behaviour either.

Throughout the book, Westover contrasts her own memories with those of others who experienced the same events. She sometimes mentions that there are gaps in her memory regarding certain key events. In my opinion, these choices, rather than making her an unreliable narrator serve to highlight the questions Educated raises about who gets to tell history and why. Westover prizes her education because it allowed her to read multiple narratives and construct her own, when before she had been forced to accept her father's narrative as truth. Therefore, by highlighting her own fallibility, she does not force the reader to accept her own narrative as truth either.

I probably won't read (or listen) to the entire book again because I found some scenes difficult to get through but I will definitely be thinking about this book for a long, long time.