As I wrote in the previous post, we've been giving one another books for Christmas. This year, as last, grandson Joel found the "hit" which this year went to his sister Cory but is making it's way around the family. I finished it last night after an immersing couple of days, finding myself in a world so clearly and perfectly drawn, but so truly dreadful that I couldn't read without breaks. The book is Educated by Tara Westover who never went to school until she defied her fiercely fundamental Mormon father (as had two older brothers) and went to Brigham Young University having studied alone (as one brother instructed) to pass the entry exam. Eventually a teacher arranged for her to go to Cambridge (in England) and from there another helped her get a Gates Foundation scholarship to get a Ph.D. at Harvard. That is the education part in the narrower sense.
Her father was fanatically dominating, fearful, (bipolar in spades!), he owns property on an Idaho mountain where he collected wrecked autos and other junk which he stripped and sold. The mother became a very competent midwife and eventually an entrepreneurial herbalist. There were seven children, one brother was (to any reader but not to the family) severely violent. The larger story beside her very bumpy formal education is the emotional immersion and dependence she feels toward the family and how very slowly and very painfully she finally becomes a self-aware, individual. The family tie is ingrained so deeply she is in emotional pain (and sometimes physical pain) most of the time.
This sounds like a difficult read and it is. The difficulty comes from the reader's perspective (can't she see what's happening) but not from the writing which is amazingly vivid but without over-reaching.
