Any curriculum that you design for yourself is going to be better, even if it’s not the absolute perfect one. I hate the the word “disempower,” because it seems kind of cliché, but I do think that we take people’s ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way. My parents would say to me all the time: you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you. That’s something that I really value from the upbringing I got. I think it’s a belief that you can learn something. Why do you think you’re so good at teaching yourself? This actually happens plenty in the book, where you focus on a certain skill or idea and learn everything you can about it. Each chapter is structured like a short story, because I was so obsessed with them. They point out all the little tricks, the writer’s mechanisms that they use to make things work. I started listening to The New Yorker fiction podcast, with Deborah Treisman, which is just amazing, because you have these writers, they come on, they pick a short story by another writer, they read it, and then they discuss it. I read a lot of Mavis Gallant, David Means, other New Yorker writers. So when I heard of the short story, I thought, “Well, I can read more of those because they’re shorter.” I thought, “Well, I’ll just read a bunch of stories, and then I’ll get a sense of what that means.” I realized reading books takes a long time. First I tried Googling it, which was of limited use. I thought, ‘Yeah, I need to get a grip on this thing called narrative arc,’ whatever that is. Well, we had books, but we didn’t have those kinds of books. How did you go from having something your writing group said was shitty to having a finished book?Ī friend of mine was talking about this thing, the short story. They would say to me, “This is really shitty. I have a writing group in London, and they were brutal.
#EDUCATED A MEMOIR HOW TO#
I had no idea how to write a story or a narrative when I started. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing. I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. She sat down with Vanity Fair to share some of her story, and her feelings about education and changing your mind.
Westover still has a western twang in her voice, and is prone to voicing her thoughts out loud, showing her quick mind at work. Westover’s story is as much about her difficult childhood and what it’s like to grow up on fringe beliefs as it is about seeing the world through the eyes of a singular, intelligent, and observant person. How she made that disorienting jump is the subject of her memoir Educated, out now from Random House. She visits doctors, has a doctorate from Cambridge, and had a fellowship at Harvard University. Today, Westover lives in a flat in London.
When Westover arrived, she fully believed she would return home eventually, marry, and live in the way her father intended. Eventually, she and a brother taught themselves enough math to attend Brigham Young University.
Her father didn't believe in doctors or “government schools,” putting the children to work in a family-owned junkyard. They were isolated from other people, even her extended family, except for at church. In the early 2000s, Tara Westover was a preteen living in Idaho with her fundamentalist Mormon family.
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