is: Educated: A Memoir. Educated is her first book.
Amazon recognized Educated: A Memoir as one of the Best Books of 2018, describing it thus:
"Tara Westover didn't see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen,
and it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life.
This extraordinary memoir chronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing,
eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Rather than a story about the
the making of a scholar, Educated is about the making of a person."
In a February 2018 interview with Vanity Fair, Westover had this to say about the writing process:
"I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers
and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in
narrative writing. I had no idea how to write a story or a narrative when I started.
And I was pretty bad at it. I have a writing group in London, and they were brutal.
They would say to me, "This is really s..... It's really bad."
In the interview, Westover continues to share her journey to published author:
"A friend of mine was talking about this thing, the short story. I'd never read a
short story before. I'd never even heard of short stories. I didn't grow up in a
family that...Well, we had books, but we didn't have those kinds of books. I thought,
"Yeah, I need to get a grip on this thing called narrative arc, "whatever that is." First
I tried Googling it, which was of limited use. I thought, "Well, I'll just read a bunch
of stories, and then I'll get a sense of what that means." I realized reading books
takes a long time. So when I hear of the the short story, I thought, "Well, I can read
more of those because they're shorter.""
"I read a lot of Mavis Gallant, David Means, other New Yorker writers. I started listening
to The New Yorker fiction podcast, with Deborah Treisman, which is just amazing,
because you have these writers, they come in, they pick a short story by another
writer, they read it, and then they discuss it. They point out all the little tricks,
the writer's mechanisms that they use to make things work. Each chapter (in Educated)
is structured like a short story, because I was so obsessed with them.""
"....My parents would say to me all the time: you can teach yourself anything better
than someone else can teach it to you...."
As you are reading Educated: A Memoir, pay attention to the chapters. What is your experience
reading the book? How does the author's structure affect your reading experience. What is
it the author is trying to say?
Come join the discussion as we explore and share our experiences and insights of this book.