Books like Educated
What should you read after Tara Westover’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Tara Westover
- 2018
- 352 pages
- Memoir
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Educated
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
The obvious next one, and it earns the place: another childhood of unfit parents and improvised survival, told without a line of self-pity or score-settling.
- Getting out of your family
- A survivalist childhood
- Plain, forceful prose
- No religion or ideology
Best for getting out of your familyUnorthodox
Deborah Feldman
Leaving a Hasidic community in Williamsburg with a small child and no qualifications — the same slow, expensive work of getting out and being called a traitor.
- Getting out of your family
- Education as escape
- A survivalist childhood
- Religion, not survivalism
Best for memory you can't trustThe Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Karr more or less invented this kind of memoir: a violent Texas childhood recalled in fragments, with the writer arguing openly about what she actually remembers.
- Memory you can't trust
- Plain, forceful prose
- A survivalist childhood
- Non-linear and impressionistic
Great matchBorn a Crime
Trevor Noah
Much funnier and every bit as clear-eyed about a mother who is the whole reason you survived — apartheid Johannesburg in place of an Idaho mountain.
- Plain, forceful prose
- Getting out of your family
- A survivalist childhood
- Comic, essayistic chapters
Great matchWhere the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens
The fictional cousin: a girl left to raise herself outside a town that has already decided what she is, teaching herself everything from books and the marsh.
- Education as escape
- Getting out of your family
- A survivalist childhood
- A novel, and a romance
- Heavy: An American MemoirWorth a look — with a warning
Heavy: An American Memoir
Kiese Laymon
Laymon writes to his mother about weight, gambling and everything neither of them said — the same refusal to make a family story flattering to anyone involved.
- Plain, forceful prose
- Memory you can't trust
- Getting out of your family
- Sexual violence and abuse
What should you read after Educated?
Educated by Tara Westover works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls — the obvious next one, and it earns the place: another childhood of unfit parents and improvised survival, told without a line of self-pity or score-settling.
If what stayed with you was getting out of your family, read Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman instead: leaving a Hasidic community in Williamsburg with a small child and no qualifications — the same slow, expensive work of getting out and being called a traitor. The Liars' Club by Mary Karr is the other strong option — karr more or less invented this kind of memoir: a violent Texas childhood recalled in fragments, with the writer arguing openly about what she actually remembers.
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