Educated

Westover grew up in rural Idaho, never went to school, and eventually made it to Cambridge. The memoir is not a triumph-over-adversity story, though it contains triumph. It is a book about the difficulty of knowing what is true when the people who raised you insist on a different version of events — about memory, family loyalty, and the cost of choosing your own mind.

Westover writes with a novelist’s control of scene and detail. The question the book keeps returning to — what do you owe the people who made you, when what they made you into is someone who can see what they did — has no clean answer. That’s what makes it worth reading.