When a Memoir Cannot Be Your Self-Help Book
I started reading Educated in the middle of an emotional crisis. I was feeling incapable, lazy, and full of self-doubt; the confidence I used to have in my intelligence and education was completely gone. I picked up this book looking for some kind of inspiration, expecting it to be the exact thing I needed at that moment. It was a heavy weight to put on an author, and it completely shaped why the book, for me, ultimately fell short.
The minute I read the synopsis, a single question popped in my mind: how? How could someone without a formal education until the age of seventeen get a PhD from Cambridge? Was she one of those high IQ kids? Was it just hard work? Sheer determination? Mentors who championed her? Luck? I needed her answer to be a guide to get me out of my current funk, as if whatever worked for her would be my salvation.
After turning the last page, that academic transformation remains a black box. Don’t get me wrong she clearly had the ingredients. But none of that fully clarifies how she overcame the steepest hurdles. We are talking about someone who entered university without knowing how to use a textbook, or how to tell fiction from historical reality in Les Misérables, yet we never see the day to day mechanics of how she closed those massive gaps. Am I holding her to an impossible standard? I understand that when you have to squeeze your entire life into a 350 page book, you are forced to make narrative choices. Things will be left behind. By centering the book so heavily on her family, she chose to sacrifice the very thing I opened it to find.
I am also questioning if the problem is me not seeing the explanations because of my own biases. Growing up, academic success was treated by every adult in my life as the ultimate prerequisite for happiness. I didn’t know a single person who hadn’t gone through traditional, formal schooling until high school graduation; I didn’t know anyone who was homeschooled. At thirty-one, I can see the holes in that logic. But even after pulling myself away from those lifelong assumptions (to the best of my abilities) and acknowledging the realities of storytelling, I still feel confident in my ask: if a memoir names itself Educated, it owes the reader a clearer picture of how that education actually happened.
Had I picked up this book purely out of curiosity rather than trying to find the meaning of life, would there be nothing but praise here? Probably. Tara is such a gifted storyteller that reading Educated almost feels like a novel. It was clear to me that she is still processing her life, and writing it may have been part of that therapy. You can see that “figuring out” process right on the pages. As someone who loves to think on the page (but for some reason shaves that thinking away while editing to bring a certainty and assertiveness I’m not even sure I need), it was quite interesting to see how the very way I draft can end up as a massively celebrated memoir.
It turns out my expectations were too tailored to my own situation for any book to live up to. Yet, even as I put that personal frustration aside and accept the beauty of her unfinished processing and writing, the stubborn, literal critic in me still closes the final page with the exact same question: how did she do it?