Educated

Tara Westover 2018

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
trauma family survival loss

Our Take

Westover grows up in a survivalist Idaho family — a kind of private cult — and educates herself out of it. The memoir is about the violence of certainty: her father's apocalyptic faith, her brother's physical abuse, the family's collectively enforced denial. Education is not just school. It is the capacity to know what you are inside.

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