memoir

Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder

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When Tyler Feder was nineteen, her much-adored mother died of cancer. Feder recounts her relationship with her mother, her mother’s brief illness and death, and the stages of guilt that follow in her beautiful graphic memoir Dancing at the Pity Party.

A mother-daughter relationship is special. I was very close to my mother and felt bereft when she died of lung cancer in 2006. I was 45 and had two young children and a flailing marriage. My mom was always in my corner. I am the oldest of four kids and being the only girl made our relationship extra special. (I know my brothers would all say they had a special relationship with mom – she was that kind of mother.)

Me -in the ugly sweater – with my brothers (L-R) Tom, James and Mark, and my parents Ed and Bobbie circa 1974. My mom did that weird “faux wood” look on the cupboards behind us.

My mom, Bobbie, was a tiny woman – 96 pounds soaking wet – who loved AM radio, instant coffee, really bad white wine, sappy movies, cooking, cheap shoes, and Tai Chi. You only had to meet her once to be considered part of the family. She loved to laugh and didn’t mind being the butt of the joke, and she often was. She made and kept friends easily because she was thoughtful and kind and generous with her time. She was a wonderful grandmother for the short time my children had her in their lives. We lived close enough to each other that my kids could go down to her house on their own from a very young age. She’d drop anything to make cookies or watch a show or go for a walk. Having her so close was handy because I am squeamish and she was a nurse. On more than one occasion she’d come running after I called and said “There’s blood.” She fixed scraped knees, and torn clothes, and broken hearts. She made perfect poached eggs and lasagna and chocolate cake with boiled icing. Following in the tradition of her mother, Sunday dinner was usually at mom’s. There could be six people or sixteen or twenty-six; it never mattered because she could cook for all of us and never break a sweat. I miss her wise counsel, her steadfastness, her unwavering support, even when I screwed up.

So, Feder’s memoir about her mother resonated with me. Her mom is carefully rendered, a warm and complete human being with a crazy fixation on eyebrow maintenance, distinctive spiky handwriting and “smiley brown eyes.” Feder herself is the oldest of three girls and, as I well know, being the oldest comes with both perks and hardships. By the time her mom’s health problems announce themselves, her prognosis is dire. Like my mom, Mrs. Feder died very quickly. There is hardly any time to process the illness, let alone the loss.

I found Dancing at the Pity Party to be funny and heart-wrenching in equal measure. Other than the fact that Feder is Jewish and so the customs surrounding grief and mourning are different from my own essentially atheist views, there was little in this memoir that wasn’t familiar to me. Her mother’s physical decline, the spread of the disease, the toll chemo took, the often inappropriate jokes and laughter contrasted with the grief and despair: all of it is part and parcel of what cancer steals from us, and weirdly, gives to us.

I think Feder’s memoir will certainly speak to anyone who has lost someone they’ve loved to cancer. Although it has been many years since my mom died, I found Dancing at the Pity Party cathartic, humourous, and honest. I think anyone who has ever been in Feder’s shoes will find something of themselves in these pages.

It is also a wonderful reminder that our loved ones never really leave us. I send Christmas cards by the dozens because I watched my mother do it year after year, including a little family update with each card she sent to the many people she knew from the many moves we’d made as I was growing up. I now host Sunday dinner – though not nearly as often as my mom did – and I feel her with me every time I pull a turkey from the oven or make Washington Pie. I love the family stories we tell around the dinner table, each of us remembering something different about our mom/sister/grandmother. I love sappy movies, (I can’t watch Dirty Dancing without thinking abut her), and Gordon Lightfoot. I get my work ethic from her. Whenever I say “Age is just a number” I think of her. She used to say that energy couldn’t be created or destroyed. She had the most positive energy of anyone I ever met, even when life was serving her a shit sandwich.

She is with me, I know. I hope Feder feels like her mother is with her, too. In any case, she has written a beautiful tribute to her and I highly recommend others read it.

Sex/Life – BB Easton

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I watched the Netflix series Sex/Life when it first came out — oh, who am I kidding, I’ve watched it more than once — and so when I came across the book on which the series is based, I thought – the book is always better so I purchased it.

BB Easton’s memoir Sex/Life: 44 Chapters about 4 Men has very little in common with the Netflix series, though. While the series actually traces one woman’s very realistic mid-life crisis (and I don’t even know whether or not it’s fair to call it that because although she’s married with two kids, she looks like she couldn’t possibly be older than 35. Still – she’s definitely having a crisis), the memoir recounts the story of the author’s sexual awakening with four different men – one of whom is now her husband. None of the other three could realistically be the Brad of the series.

One thing the book and the series have in common is that, like the series, the author is looking for a way to kickstart her married sex life. She loves her husband, he is “at least ninety percent perfect” and although he is gorgeous, and kind, a wonderful father and provider, “self-deprecating and tolerant of [her] bullshit” – he’s kind of boring in the sack. In fact, he is often not interested in sex, like, at all.

This is what compels Easton to do a deep dive into her sexual past, and these reminiscences end up in a journal which her husband discovers and reads, and which seems to kickstart his libido. That’s also like the series. (Except in the series, she’s mostly talking about Brad and none of the three dudes she talks about in this memoir are him – at least I don’t think they are. There’s Knight, a local skinhead she meets when she’s a teen. Knight introduces her to BDSM and body piercings. There’s Harley, the stoner with no brains and a penis tattooed on his head, and there’s Hans, bass player for a local band. Perhaps Brad is some sort of amalgamation of all three of these characters, which is unfortunate because Brad is way more sympathetic than any of these three dudes.)

Easton’s memoir is often funny, definitely raunchy but, strangely, it lacks the introspection of the series. What I appreciated about the series, which did not exist at all in the book, was Billie’s tumble back into her past. She loves her life, but she feels that she is missing something essential – something that makes her feel like herself. I think lots of women can probably relate to that. You’re a mom, and a wife, and especially when your children are young, you make a lot of sacrifices. Billie wants to know why she can’t have it all.

The series is also angsty as hell. Yes, sure, Brad is a “bad boy” and he breaks Billie’s heart – but when he suddenly reappears eight years after their break-up, it detonates a bomb in her life — a bomb that was waiting to go off anyway. I think the series does an exceptional job of walking that line many women traverse. Plus, it’s as steamy as heck.

So, I guess I have to thank Easton for writing Sex/Life as it provided the source material for the series, but the series is just way better, imho.

Searching for John Hughes – Jason Diamond

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People of a certain age will likely understand what I mean when I say that John Hughes’s movies were a touchstone for adolescents. I know that 16 Candles is definitely problematic now – I mean hunky Jake Ryan hands over his drunken girlfriend to the Geek – but back in 1984 it spoke our language.

Jason Diamond grew up in the Chicago suburbs made famous in many of Hughes’s films (Home Alone, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful to name but a few). His memoir Searching For John Hughes traces his childhood with deeply unhappy parents who eventually divorce and then, by the time he is a teenager, all but abandon him. (Just as well: they sound awful.) He literally couch surfs his way through high school until a kind teacher offers him a more permanent place to stay.

Diamond is an outlier for most of his adolescence. He’s not smart enough or athletic enough or good-looking enough; he doesn’t fit in anywhere or have any particular talents. He does love John Hughes movies, though. Molly Ringwald is the first girl Diamond ever loves “before [he] even liked girls, when they were still “gross” to [him].”

…watching Pretty in Pink made me feel good. It made me happy…and we’re led to believe everybody will live happily ever after.

Although I was familiar with the concept, this idea that you could one day be happy and have what you wanted, it seemed so foreign. It was usually the kind of thing I’d read about in fairy tales, something about some prince or princess, people I couldn’t really relate to; they were cartoons or made up stories. But here, right before my eyes, were these kids only a few years older than me, things turning out right for them after all, and they seemed real to me. As if I could be them some day.

After high school, Diamond moves to NYC. The only thing he wants to do, the only thing he’s good at, is writing. He decides that he’s going to write the definitive biography of his idol, John Hughes. It’s not that easy, of course, and the book we eventually get is less biography and more memoir about how Diamond muddles through his 20s, making lattes or waiting tables and selling the odd music review to pay the bills. I actually lived in New York when I was in my 20s, so in some respects I could relate to Diamond’s angst, but I have to say that his recollections of this time are relentlessly grim.

Although Hughes does play a role in the book – after all, Diamond tells everyone he is writing it – this is more a book about someone who is desperately lost trying to figure it out. That’s likely a story many people can relate to. The nods to Hughes and his movies will be meaningless to people who aren’t fans — that was the reason I bought the book — but even if you don’t even know who Hughes is, it’s likely you’ll find something to relate to in Diamond’s quest to grow up and make something of his life.

How Reading Changed My Life – Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen’s (Every Last One) essay How Reading Changed My Life is an essay every book lover will enjoy. I call it an essay because it’s just 70 pages long, but maybe reading memoir is more appropriate. Quindlen recounts her early days as a reader, the value books have had in her life, and (given that this was published in 1998) a look at the future of books in the digital age.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort – God, sex, food, family, friends – reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room.

Quindlen’s essay sings the praises of being a book drunkard and is critical of the notion that we should be reading solely as “a tool for advancement.” Of course I read to learn things, but I am mostly a pleasure reader, a ludic reader. I have piles of books everywhere and hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves because I will get to them some day. I swear.

Quindlen, too, reads for pleasure. She shares her memories of the first book that “seized [her] completely by the throat”, so much so that she read it and reread it, believing that it was “the best book ever written.” Of course, now she admits it’s probably – critically speaking, at least – not very good, but still finds it “a good read, but no longer a masterwork.” All readers have a book like this in their personal canon. Mine is probably Velocity. I mean, that book probably isn’t high art, but I’ve read it more than any other book and it still guts me. Quindlen allows for reading that is personal; there is no room for snobbery, and I appreciate that.

…if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lesson human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?

Preach!

How Reading Changed My Life tackles censorship (“It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books.”), assigned reading (“In fact, one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general.”) and books in the digital age (“It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so.”)

This book is a delight. Highly recommended.

A Rip in Heaven – Jeanine Cummins

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It was only a few months ago that I read Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, a novel that, though not without controversy, I could not put down. I had the same experience with her memoir/true crime A Rip in Heaven. I was about 40 pages along when I settled in to read the other night and I finally had to turn off my light at 2 a.m. It was a school night and that’s way past light’s out for me, but I just couldn’t stop reading it.

In 1991, 16-year-old Cummins, her younger sister, Kathy, 14, and older brother, Tom, 18, are vacationing in St. Louis with their parents. Both sides of the family are there, so the siblings have lots of cousins to hang with and it’s a happy time. Tom, in particular, has developed a close bond with his cousins, Julie and Robin, and on his last night in town, he sneaks out to visit the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, where Julie, an aspiring poet, has left some of her poetry by way of graffiti. Mostly the cousins don’t want their time together to end.

Although it was never officially accredited as a landmark, the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge was widely recognized as one, and the city of Madison was loathe to have it torn down. A couple of decades came and went while the old bridge stood silently straddling the Mississippi and gathering rust. […] Local affection for the bridge, combined with the enormous price tag of demolishing it, kept it standing. By 1991 the bridge, though structurally sound, was in a terrible state of disrepair, and it had become a favorite local hangout for teenagers and graffiti artists from both banks.

It is on this bridge, sometime after midnight, that the trio encounter 23-year-old Marlin Gray, a smooth-talking, good looking, layabout; Daniel Winfrey, “an awkward scrawny kid,”; Reginald Clemons, “a shy, and quiet man of nineteen” and Antonio Richardson, Clemons’s cousin, who was “just plain bad news.” At first these four seem relatively benign to the cousins, but it doesn’t take long for things to take an horrific turn. Tom and his cousins end up in the Mississippi; Tom is the only survivor.

The actual crime is so mindless and so awful, it’s almost hard to believe. It turns out, that’s part of the problem for Tom. When he is finally able to get help, the cops don’t believe his story. The cops employee ever dirty tactic in the book to get him to admit to their version of events and he is finally arrested and charged with two counts of first degree murder.

Cummins writes A Rip in Heaven in the third person, adopting her childhood nickname, Tink, as a way to somewhat distance herself from this story, which is both devastating, and riveting. Like I said, I couldn’t put the book down and had to force myself to turn the light out so I wouldn’t be a hot mess at school the next day. The book follows Tom’s time in police custody and the subsequent trials, which Cummins has pieced together from court documents, police records and interviews. It is also a plea that we not forget the victims in cases such as these. Cummins acknowledges that “As a society, we have a certain fascination with murder and violence. […] We want to know why atrocities happen; we want to understand the causes of wickedness.” But as Cummins points out, “The dead can’t tell their own stories,” so often the perpetrators of the crimes find themselves at the center of attention. This was also the case for the four young men involved in this case.

By all accounts, Julie and Robin were amazing young women, and their deaths left a hole in the lives of all those who loved them: a rip in heaven. Cummins has managed to capture the trauma, the drama and the way this family banded together to survive it. It makes for compelling reading.

The End of Your Life Book Club – Will Schwalbe

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Will Schwalbe’s memoir, The End of Your Life Book Club, is about the last couple of years before his mother’s death from pancreatic cancer and it is a beautiful tribute to family, faith, hope and books. Always books. This book has been languishing on my tbr shelf for ages and it’s one of those books that when I finished, with a satisfied sigh and perhaps a tear or two, I thought I wish I’d picked you up sooner. I guess Schwalbe and his mom, Mary Anne, might say that the book found me at the right time.

I imagine Schwalbe’s family as sort of East Coast aristocracy, without the snobbish bits. His parents both worked in academia, and then his father got into concert management. Schwalbe describes his mother as “the hub” of the family.

Mom didn’t confine herself to coordinating our lives. She was also helping to coordinate, almost always at their request, the lives of hundreds of others: at her church at The Woman’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children (she’d been the founding director), at the International Rescue Committee (she’d been board staff liaison and founded the IRC’s UK branch), and at all the other myriad organizations where she’d worked or served on boards.

Mary Anne is clearly a force to be reckoned with and her cancer diagnosis is a setback not a death sentence. She’s diagnosed in 2007, first with hepatitis, and then eventually with pancreatic cancer. Mary Anne’s oncologist calls her cancer “treatable but not curable”, and these words offer Mary Anne and her family (her husband, and Schwalbe’s brother and sister) hope.

The Schwalbe family have always been readers and soon Will and his mother have formed a book club of two, reading and discussing a variety of books over the long hours at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC, where Mary Anne gets her hope by way of chemotherapy.

Our book club got its formal start with the mocha and one of the most casual questions two people can ask each other: What are you reading?

Beginning with Wallace Stegner’s 1987 novel Crossing to Safety, a book which I read many years ago, the mother and son read their way through classics, non-fiction, popular fiction and do what any book lovers do – debate, deconstruct and discuss. They don’t always agree, but they appreciate each other’s choices, and as any reader knows many a great discussion can be had even if you didn’t necessarily love the book. These discussions also allow them to share their lives with each other in a meaningful way. Schwalbe is hyper aware that he knows his mother as ‘mom’, the person who kept his world on its axis, but perhaps he doesn’t know her quite so well as Mary Anne, the woman. This is his opportunity.

Mary Anne’s faith is the constant in her journey, and although Schwalbe doesn’t share her certainty about God and the afterlife, he is buoyed by hers. Mary Anne constantly sees the upside. When hearing of a friend’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis she says “I feel so lucky […] I can’t imagine what it would be like not to be able to know the people I love, or to read, or to remember books I’ve read or to visit my favorite places and remember everything that happened there, all the wonderful times. “

The End of Your Life Book Club is not as maudlin as it might sound. It’s a beautiful book that reminds us of the value and irreplaceable nature of family, and reminds us how important it is to cultivate relations with the people in our lives. Mary Anne struck me as the kind of woman who looked you in the eye when she talked to you. As Schwalbe reminds us “we’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be our last, each conversation the final one.”

Highly recommended.

Her Last Death – Susanna Sonnenberg

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Susanna Sonnenberg’s memoir Her Last Death recounts the author’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother. I couldn’t relate. My mother, Bobbie, was perfect. Well, of course she wasn’t perfect, but she was all the things Sonnenberg’s mother wasn’t: pragmatic, steady, selfless, reasonable. I could always count on her counsel and support. Our disagreements were few and far between and I couldn’t have gone months without talking to her. She died in 2006 of lung cancer at the age of 67 and I miss her every day.

I know I was lucky. Lots of women have fraught relationships with their moms. It wasn’t in my mother’s nature to be competitive or confrontational. She wasn’t interested in being center stage. She wanted her children to be happy and I know she probably made many sacrifices to ensure our lives were as good as she could possibly make them.

Sonnenberg was born into a family of wealth and privilege. Her parents, Ben and Wendy Adler (known in the book as Nat and Daphne) were movers and shakers in NYC. Her father was something of a literary legend on Grand Street in the 1980s. Her parents divorced when Sonnenberg was three, and Sonnenberg’s relationship with him seems rather sporadic until she’s older and makes a concerted effort to spend time with him.

Her mother is a larger-than-life character. From a very young age, her mother confides in her, depends on her, schools her in the skewed way she sees the world. When Sonnenberg is just a little girl her mother tells her “”You must never let a man remove your knickers unless you intend to sleep with him.”” Daphne parades an endless string of men into their apartment; she seems only to have to crook her finger. As Sonnenberg gets older, some of these men happen to be her classmates. On her sixteenth birthday, Daphne presents Sonnenberg with a Montblanc fountain pen, “…the finest pen ever made…for your writing” and a gram of coke, which she proudly announces she cut herself. She cautions her daughter: “Please, please, darling, don’t ever do someone else’s coke. You never know what it’s cut with. Promise?”

Daphne is clearly mentally ill, but somehow that doesn’t make her sympathetic. Sonnenberg isn’t particularly sympathetic, either, but at least you can understand how she ends up so screwed up. And she is: she’s selfish and self-absorbed. She sleeps with pretty much every guy she crosses paths with. It takes her a long time to figure out who she is and what she wants. The last third of the memoir is pretty much un-put-downable.

Being a mother requires a great deal of sacrifice. In her way, Daphne loved her children, but that love was predicated on her own desires. She always came first. For many years, Sonnenberg lives by that same creed. It’s not until she really falls in love and has her own children that she understands how much must be given of oneself.

I lift my children from the water and rub them warm with the towel. I bind them tight, hold them against me, whisper into their hair. I know this is love. It’s the single moment of parenting in which I am certain I am doing the right thing, in which, without review, I yield to an instinct.

My mother had good parenting instincts. She knew how to say the right things. She protected us when we needed it, and pushed us out into the world when we needed that, too. Parenting is hard work. It’s frustrating and exhausting and scary. Sometimes it’s no fun. But then, sometimes, it’s everything.

Born a Crime – Trevor Noah

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Although I knew that U.S. based comedian Trevor Noah was from South Africa, I knew nothing other than that about him. Noah’s 2016 memoir, Born a Crime was named one of the best books of the year by just about everyone including The New York Times, CBC and NPR. The accolades don’t stop there, and nor should they, because Born a Crime is the immensely readable, inspirational and funny story of Noah’s extremely humble beginnings.

Noah was raised mostly by his mother, Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah. His father, a white man, is of Swiss/German descent. “During apartheid, one of the worst crimes you could commit was having sexual relations with a person of another race. Needless to say, my parents committed that crime,” Noah explains. The book’s title refers to Noah’s birth.

…on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations – I was born a crime.

Noah guides us through the early years of his life, years that were marked by trips to church, “at least four nights a week”, poverty, and his mother’s no-nonsense but loving approach to parenting. From her, Noah learned that language is power (and because of this Noah learned to speak several languages.) “It became a tool that served me my whole life,” he explains. Once, when he was being followed by a group of Zulu guys, he heard them say in their own language that they were going to mug him. He was able to diffuse the situation when he spoke to them in Zulu.

That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.

No surprise, then, that Noah goes on to make his living with words.

Noah hustles his way through his adolescence – making money by getting people what they want, everything from treats from the school canteen to bootlegged CDs to DJ services for events. He tells these stories with charming self-deprecation. I can only imagine that the audio book would be so much fun to listen to.

Although this memoir doesn’t tell us how Noah got his big break, I think it’s clear how, out of necessity, determined and resourceful he was. The book is dedicated to his mother, and it’s easy to see why: her faith in her son is unwavering and fierce.

This is a really excellent book.

Here’s a bit of Noah from a stand up show in 2015.

They Called Us Enemy – George Takei

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Readers of a certain age will recognize George Takei from his stint on Star Trek (1966-69), where he played Lt. Sulu. He’s had a long show biz career beginning back in 1955. At 83 he’s still working, but is probably best known (currently) for his provocative and political Tweets. I am one of his 3.1 million Twitter followers. He is also an outspoken advocate for gay rights.

Takei, along with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, wrote the words and Harmony Becker has illustrated the story of Takei’s young life in graphic form. They Called Us Enemy introduces readers to George, who lives with his brother, Henry, and baby sister, Nancy, with their parents in Los Angeles.

My father, Takekuma Norman Takei, was born in Yamanashi, Japan. He came to America as a teenager and was educated in the Bay area. He later pursued a lucrative dry cleaning business in Los Angeles’ Wilshire corridor.

My mother, Fumiko Emily Nakamura, was born in Florin. California, but was raised traditionally Japanese. Her father had sent her to Japan to avoid school segregation in Sacramento.

Life was pretty awesome until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour and the government decided to round up anyone of Japanese descent and place them in camps. These people could take only what they could carry. Their homes and businesses were confiscated; their rights as American citizens null and void.

First stop for George and his family was the Santa Anita Racetrack where they were “assigned to a horse stall still pungent with the stink of manure.” George’s reminiscences are seen through a child’s eyes and all his experiences are tempered by his father, who somehow managed to make the best of the situation in which they found themselves.

Through my child’s eyes, Daddy always seemed in command of any given situation. It was my father who bore the pain, the anguish…and the torturous experiences the most in our family.

Takei’s story is one of resilience and it is no wonder that he is such a force of nature when it comes to activism of all sorts. They Called Us Enemy methodically, and almost without emotion, recounts his story, and the story of thousands of other Japanese who were wrongly imprisoned. I think it’s also a love letter to his father, who Takei claims “taught me the power of American democracy – the people’s democracy.” That’s saying something given the circumstances.

Canada did no better post- Pearl Harbour. Our government rounded up 21,000 Japanese Canadians without charge or due process, exiling them to remote areas of British Columbia and elsewhere. It’s a shameful part of our history and the only way to atone is to make sure it never happens again. Sadly, the world seems to be getting crazier by the moment.

They Called Us Enemy is a chilling and sobering look at what happens when we become afraid of people who don’t look like us. It’s yet another skeleton in our historical closet, and is well worth your reading time.

Educated – Tara Westover

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educatedOur first book club pick for 2019 was Tara Westover’s compelling memoir Educated.  Born and raised in southern Idaho, Westover tells the remarkable story of living in the shadow of  Buck’s Peak, the youngest of seven children. Like virtually everyone else in the nearby town, Tara was raised as a Mormon, but as she says in the author’s notes “This is not a book about Mormonism.”

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Tara’s father is beyond the pale in terms of his beliefs and how they impact his children.  Not only is he a devout Mormon, he’s a survivalist. He preaches that the government is evil. Tara and her siblings don’t go to school, or to the hospital when they are sick. Tara didn’t even have a birth certificate until she was nine. When his mother suggests that Tara (and her sisters and brothers) should be attending school, he tells her that “public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God. “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself…as send them down the road to that school.””

Instead of school, Tara helps with a variety of jobs around their property. Her three oldest brothers had helped their father build barns or hay sheds, but her two oldest brothers had recently left and then her brother Tyler announces that he wants to go to college. Tara is perhaps ten when Tyler makes this announcement and she has to ask what college is. Her father tells her that it’s “extra school for people too dumb to lean the first time around.”

The fact that Tyler leaves the mountain to attend school has a profound impact on Tara. He’s not like her oldest brothers, Tony (whom we learn very little about) and Shawn (the story’s villain). Tyler “liked books, he liked quiet.” He introduces Tara to classical music and it becomes their secret language. To understand the huge impact Tyler has on Tara’s life, one only has to note that her book is dedicated to him.

Eventually, Tara makes the decision that she, too, wants an education. This is remarkable because she’s had no formal schooling. Instead, she has to study on her own and pass ACT, a standardized test that will allow her to attend college without a high school diploma. She is motivated, not only by her desire to learn, but also by the increasingly violent and erratic behaviour of her brother, Shawn.

Educated is a riveting family drama and also the story of how an education (and I’m not even really talking about a formal education here, although Tara certainly has one of those, including a PhD from Cambridge) can change a person’s life. Despite the fact that Tara might describe her childhood as happy, there is no doubt that her father suffered from mental illness and her mother is complicit in the abuse she suffers at the hands of her brother, Shawn. Tara’s attempt to honestly portray her family and the things that happened to her makes for compelling reading.

Listen to Tara answer questions about her story here.

Highly recommended.