Educated: A Memoir
A fascinating memoir of a girl who was home-schooled in remote rural Idaho. By the time Tara came along, Mom had lost interest in the “school” part of home-schooling, so she lived a sort of improvised dystopian version of Summerhill while working for her manic-depressive, zealous, and very dangerous father in the family junkyard. Her parents don’t hold with public schools, or with medicine, or with the government, and are actively preparing for the end-times by canning fruit and stockpiling ammo. Her father is certain that civilization will collapse from Y2K: when midnight passes and the television fails to go off the air, she’s relieved but vaguely disappointed.
When an older brother beings to turn chronically violent and abusive, Tara flees to Brigham Young University, where she is appalled by the other students’ apparel (whorish) and her own ignorance (profound). Starting college, she had no idea what the holocaust was; reading Les Miserables because it seemed the sort of book a college student should read, she bogs down. “Napoleon felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either.”