Tara Westover Memoir
- Undoubtedly, Tara’s experience talking about higher education with our parents was much different than mine. After reading a memoir, I would hope that readers have new questions about their understanding of the events and people being scrutinized rather than feeling confident that their understanding is now sufficient to render accurate judgment.
- This story is not about Mormonism. Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not.
- Educated: A Memoir is Tara Westover’s autobiography. In it, she shows us her transformation from being the daughter of survivalist, fundamentalist, anti-science, anti-medicine, and anti-education parents, to becoming a Cambridge-educated historian.
Tara Westover Educated Memoir
Harrowing beyond belief and painful to read, Tara Westover's Educated will surely become a classic memoir. Educated by Tara Westover is sure to become a modern classic. Educated is an account of Tara Westover's life as part of a Mormon funadmentalist family living in Idaho. Read our interview with Tara Westover, author of the memoir 'Educated,' where she talks about the book, her family and the meaning of the story. “The ground has shifted,” author Tara Westover.
Publishing it was pretty much the most insane idea I’ve ever had.
And a lot of insane things happened as a result.
Some very nice things
Named Nonfiction Book of the Year by the American Booksellers Association
Finalist for the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle Award
Finalist for the Autobiography Award from the National Book Critics Circle Award
One of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2018
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Autobiography
Alex Award from the American Library Association
Audie Award for Autobiography/Memoir
Audie Award for Best Female Narrator (because Julia is fab)
Amazon Editors’ pick for Best Book of 2018
Apple’s Best Memoir of the Year
Audible’s Best Memoir of the Year
Hudson Group Best Book of the Year
President Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year List
Bill Gates’s Holiday Reading List
Should you want a copy, try these:
A great way to energize yourself to write memoir is to spend time reading memoirs! A well-written memoir is bound to inspire you to write your own! And, a well-written memoir indirectly gives you strategies and techniques to use in writing your own story.
I recently came across the beautifully-written memoir, Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. The title reflects the theme of the book – the struggle for the author to escape the family mandate to avoid school. Her father, whom she later realized must have suffered from bipolar disorder, was a paranoid and suspicious person who believed he was protecting his children by keeping them away from schools and from the broader American culture. Her mother, while not totally on board, went along with her husband’s rules on this and on most other family matters.
In the prologue, Westover uses an emblematic scene to introduce the memoir’s theme. She begins with the sentence, “I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn.” After describing the valley below, she gives us this stunning paragraph:
Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping.
Wow! In just a few words, Westover has established the setting, the fact that she has brothers, the domestic role of her mother, the occupation of her father, and … especially … the fact that none of the kids get on the school bus. None of them go to school.
Westover devotes much of the first three chapters developing the back story of her parents, i.e., what their parents had been like. In Chapter 3, she reveals that her mother’s mother had come from the “wrong” kind of family but, after marrying a navy man, devoted her life to being “respectable” – with the white picket fence and other status symbols. But her daughter, Westover’s mother, had rebelled against all this “respectability” and had run off and married a sort of “bad boy,” Westover’s father. This back story adds depth to the memoir.
Another brilliant aspect of this memoir is the way that Westover identifies generational patterns. At her grandmother’s funeral, she realizes that her grandmother must have felt some of the same feelings she herself was experiencing:
Grandma was the only person who might have understood what was happening to me. How the paranoia and fundamentalism were carving up my life, how they were taking from me the people I cared about and leaving only degrees and certificates – an air of respectability – in their place. What was happening now had happened before. This was the second severing of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop.
Tara Westover Autobiography
YOUR TURN:There is so much more in this memoir that I could comment on, so many strategies to tell a story with honesty and skill. I urge memoir writers to read Educated: A Memoir. And, I invite you to email us some of your favorite passages, along with why you like them. Any criticisms are also welcome. The idea is to read like a writer, noting what works and what, sometimes may not.
Tara Westover Memoirs
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