Tara Westover’s memoir, Educated, is difficult to digest. She’s the youngest of seven children in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho. Her father rules with the proverbial iron fist. He’s a survivalist, a millennialist, a conspiracy-theorist. He keeps his children out of school, refuses them medical care, continually places them in physical danger. Her mother resists in small ways but ultimately caves whenever the father demands her submission. One of her brothers educates himself well enough to get into BYU and encourages Tara to […]
Biography/Memoir
Don’t let the cover mislead you. There are no grizzlies on the Appalachian Trail.
I added this book to my TBR the very first day I joined Goodreads in July 2008, so yes I do feel accomplished for finally having read it. And it was a good time! I was a bit worried based on a few reviews I’d read ahead of time that it would be dated, and it was a tiny bit (mostly in some jokes Bryson makes that read a little fatphobic to my 2018 eyes and ears, but would have been absolutely bog standard in […]
Unfortunately timed (although appropriately titled) memoir
I listened to the audio version of Unqualified by Anna Faris and the whole time I kept thinking how awkward it must have been for Anna to have this memoir come out about two months after she announced her divorce to Chris Pratt. There is some hasty editing that alludes to the past tense of their relationship but there are a few essays that probably needed a second look; hell she dedicated the book to Pratt alone (when they have a kid together) and while he wrote […]
“I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.”
I basically read this all in one sitting last Saturday morning. It’s a relative short book at around 220 pages, but I think I would have wanted to read it fast even if it were 400. Nichole Chung, unsurprisingly to anyone who’s read her other work (I’ve mostly done so on The (dearly departed) Toast), is a very good writer. In fact, she started writing about adoption years before this book was published; I remember reading several of her articles about it and thinking at […]