Educated: A Memoir

"I think so. She has a remarkable story. All of these books, as you’ve probably noticed, are quite different from one another, with different strengths. With Westover’s book, it’s the story. It is simply so remarkable that people could not put it down. I like how she wrote it in three sections, and how her voice changes in each section. The first is written from the point of view of herself as a child and I thought that was the strongest section of the book. She had a terrible childhood, I think, by anybody’s standards. I think she knew it was terrible at the time but she didn’t know it was unusual . To her, it was normal. That first section reminded me, in a way, of Angela’s Ashes , which Frank McCourt wrote in the voice of himself as a child. His family was living in abject poverty. But when you’re a kid, you don’t really understand how hard life is when everybody around you is living the same way. So, I thought the first section of Educated did that as well. In the second section, where she starts getting out into the world and realises what a freak she is, her voice changes. She’s not as sure of herself, she’s amazed by what she doesn’t know, and she’s a little terrified by the world and what is expected of her. “This was a true coming-of-age memoir about tenacity and the transformative power of education” And then the last section was the hardest to read because that’s where she has come into her own, but realises she still wants her family—and her family is not prepared to accept her now that she has changed so much. It was heart-breaking. She keeps going home and going home and going home, and hoping they will be different and that they will accept her. And they don’t. This was a true coming-of-age memoir about tenacity and the transformative power of education, but it was also about the pull of family and the need for love. Yes. I think it does. I think it’s one of the defining characteristics of memoir: that people remember things a certain way, and their memory may or may not be accurate. They’re often challenged by people who grew up with them or who experienced the same thing and remember it in a completely different way. Often these are things you cannot really research. They’re not the facts of the world at that time but they’re personal things that happened to you or your family. Westover is challenged as well by people in her family who tell her that what she’s experiencing is not actually happening—her older brother in particular. A sort of gas-lighting occurs. Sometimes a memoirist can’t find out the truth, or the truth changes, or it shifts as the writer’s perspective shifts. Rigoberto Gonzalez said in an interview about his new memoir that he purposely did not check his memories with anyone else’s; he wanted only his own perspective. And Richard Beard, in his book, kept running into places where memory—his own, and others’—contradicted documented fact."

"This is one of the best books that I’ve read in the last decade. Quite apart from the extraordinary story of her life, it is so beautifully written. So powerfully written. I read this book when it was first published, was blown away by it, and emailed her publishers to say ‘I’d like to do anything to help. Can I have Tara on my podcast?’ So I had the great fortune of talking to her about her own memoir. What I’d taken from the memoir was that it was about how you can remove yourself from your environment and, if you have the thirst and the curiosity to ask the right questions of yourself and your environment, you can educate yourself in so many different ways. But what she said to me was that, for her, it was very much about memory and fallibility of memory. “This is one of the best books that I’ve read in the last decade” When she was growing up, as is the case in most families, her parents were in charge of the dominant narrative because they were the grown-ups. So she never questioned the fact that her father thought the end of days was coming and they shouldn’t ever go to the hospital and that Ibuprofen was the work of the devil. That was just what she was taught, and it was only as she came into her teenage years and her older brother was being flippantly abusive towards her that she started to question the rightness of that. When she questioned it openly with her family they shut her down. That was when she realised, years later, when she came to write this memoir, that’s when her own memory had been playing tricks on her. Her own memory had rewritten the past to make it acceptable. I just thought that was a really fascinating aspect, not just of Tara’s story, but the wider historical narrative of the world. Because things are often only written in retrospect and memory is fallible. And the things that are written are often only written by a.) men, and b.) triumphant men. It just throws into question what we’re being taught about our collective past. Absolutely. For Tara, her self-identity was so wrapped up in having made the enormous decision to distance herself from her family. To choose a different path and to be academic. That first test represented so much more than just an academic failure. It represented, to her at the time, a failure of self. And I think a lot of people who strive to do well at school, as I did, are rewarded for doing well in school by their teachers and praised for it. That then becomes a sort of cycle where you think if I put the work in and get the result, life’s going to be peachy. And then when you fail the test it feels like real devastation. And secondly, when you leave school and you go into the real world, you realise there aren’t all these handy tests to tell you how you’re doing and that in itself can be discombobulating and difficult for high achievers at school. A test at school is never just a test. If you can treat it as ‘just a test’ then you are a highly evolved human being."