Educated

Tara Westover’s acclaimed memoir recounts growing up in a survivalist Mormon family in rural Idaho, kept out of school and hospitals by a father who distrusted the government. Teaching herself enough to enter university, she goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge — at the cost of a painful rupture with her family. It’s a gripping, beautifully written meditation on education, self-invention, and the tension between loyalty and freedom. A modern classic of the memoir form.