Recommendations
Books Like Educated
Best books to read after Educated by Tara Westover
Educated is a story about choosing your own understanding of reality over your family's — and the cost of that choice. These 8 books share its examination of extreme upbringings, intellectual awakening, and the complicated loyalty that ties people to the families that damaged them.
- 1Buy
Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 2005 memoir about growing up with nomadic, alcohol-dependent, libertarian parents who refused conventional housing and education is the closest parallel to Educated — both books are about children navigating profoundly unconventional upbringings, both explore the complicated love and loyalty that persists despite damage, and both became bestsellers that made extreme childhoods a major genre of memoir.
- 2Buy
Know My Name
by Chanel Miller
Miller's 2019 memoir about reclaiming her identity from the reductive frame of the Brock Turner sexual assault case shares Educated's central act: asserting your own understanding of your experience against the version that powerful people (a family, a legal system) insist on, and refusing to let that version be the only one that counts.
- 3Buy
The Liar's Club
by Mary Karr
Karr's 1995 memoir about growing up in an East Texas oil town with a volatile mother and a family defined by secrets and silences is one of the foundational works of contemporary literary memoir, and its portrait of a childhood in which the adults' version of reality cannot be trusted is a direct predecessor to Educated's exploration of the same territory.
- 4Buy
A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Yanagihara's 2015 novel about four friends from college — centered on Jude St. Francis and the childhood abuse he has survived — is the fiction closest to Educated in its portrait of the long aftermath of childhood damage and the question of whether it is possible to build a self outside the damage that shaped you.
- 5Buy
Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 memoir about growing up in desperate poverty in Limerick, Ireland is the most celebrated memoir of extreme childhood deprivation in modern American publishing and the standard against which subsequent memoirs of difficult childhoods are measured — the predecessor Educated arrived to join.
- 6Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his son about growing up Black in Baltimore and the education he found at Howard University — which taught him a different version of American history than the one he had been given — is the closest parallel to Educated in its account of education as the discovery that the version of reality you were raised with is not the only one, and in the specific grief of that discovery.
- 7Buy
Hillbilly Elegy
by J.D. Vance
Vance's 2016 memoir about growing up in an Appalachian family in Ohio and Kentucky, defined by poverty, addiction, and the social collapse of the Rust Belt, shares Educated's portrayal of a childhood shaped by forces outside conventional American experience and its examination of the relationship between individual ambition and the community left behind.
- 8Buy
Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs's 2002 memoir about being given away by his mother to her psychiatrist, whose family lived in dysfunction so extreme it borders on the surreal, uses dark humor to approach a genuinely disturbing childhood with the same retrospective clarity that Westover brings to her own impossible upbringing — both books suggest that telling the story clearly is itself a survival mechanism.
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