Educated
Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist Mormon family in Idaho without formal education until she taught herself enough to gain entry to Cambridge became a defining memoir of the decade. Its exploration of the cost of escaping a family, and the meaning of education as liberation, is unforgettable.
Skeptical readers keep asking where the money came from, tuition, a car, rent to move to Utah, for a family otherwise presented as isolated and scraping by. One writes plainly, “money and rent to get to Utah came from somewhere,” and another questions the string of severe injuries treated only with home remedies, calling out “the number of life-threatening injuries and survived to tell about.” A third simply “could not buy into what was being set forward.” The doubt isn't only a reader's guess: Westover's family has said through an attorney that the book holds only “a little germ of truth,” and at least one sibling has said on record that she reframes what other family members did or felt. Some readers add that no outside adult ever intervened despite how visible the danger sometimes was.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
