Recommendations
Books Like Educated
Best books to read after Educated by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's Educated is the memoir of self-education from an Idaho survivalist childhood to a Cambridge PhD. These recommendations explore the memoir of escape and self-discovery tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the book about what it costs and what it means to leave the world you were born into for the one you were able to imagine.
- 1Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
The closest companion memoir — Jeannette Walls growing up with nomadic, irresponsible, brilliant parents and making her way to New York and a journalism career; the memoir that most directly parallels Educated's arc of a chaotic childhood overcome through determination.
- 2Buy
Wild
by Cheryl Strayed
The self-reconstruction outdoor memoir companion — Cheryl Strayed hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone after her mother's death and the collapse of her marriage; shares Educated's interest in what a woman has to do to find herself after a childhood that gave her no resources for it.
- 3Buy
Hillbilly Elegy
by J.D. Vance
The working-class American escape companion — Vance growing up in Appalachian Ohio and by determination reaching Yale Law School; the closest parallel to Educated's arc of escape from a chaotic working-class family, and an equally controversial and debated memoir.
- 4Buy
The Color of Water
by James McBride
The mother-son story of race, religion, and education — James McBride and his white Jewish mother Ruth McBride Jordan who raised twelve Black children in poverty and sent them all to college; shares Educated's interest in education as the thing that makes the next generation different from the one that raised them.
- 5Buy
I Am Malala
by Malala Yousafzai
The international education memoir companion — Malala Yousafzai surviving a Taliban bullet for the right to attend school in Pakistan and going on to win the Nobel Peace Prize; shares Educated's conviction that education is the thing worth fighting for even when the people around you cannot see its value.
- 6Buy
The Liar's Club
by Mary Karr
The Texas chaotic childhood memoir companion — Karr growing up in an East Texas oil town with an unstable mother and a storytelling father; the predecessor memoir in the tradition Educated works in: a woman looking honestly at a childhood that would have destroyed most people.
- 7Buy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
The classic coming-of-age novel companion about education — Francie Nolan in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, the girl who educates herself through the public library and determination; the fictional predecessor that most shares Educated's belief in books and learning as the path to a different life.
- 8Buy
Becoming
by Michelle Obama
The most widely read female self-construction memoir — Michelle Robinson Obama from Chicago's South Side to Princeton, Harvard Law, and the White House; shares Educated's interest in what a woman has to do and what she has to leave behind to become the person she wants to be.
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