Book comparison
Educated vs The Glass Castle
Read Educated for the sharper and more ambitious book about what it costs to leave a family’s version of reality, and The Glass Castle for the warmer one about loving parents who kept failing you. Both are memoirs of childhood neglect, so pick knowing that.
Educated
Tara Westover
2018 · 6h 45m
Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
2005 · 5h 15m
The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls's memoir about growing up as the second of four children in a family that moved constantly across the American Southwest and West Virginia.
Where they agree
Both are American memoirs by daughters whose parents held convictions that left the children unschooled, underfed and unprotected, and both are about getting out through work and education and then having to decide what to do about the people left behind. Neither writer takes the easy route of turning her parents into villains: the affection is real and stays on the page alongside the damage. Both involve hunger, untreated injury and genuine physical danger to children, and Educated also describes sustained violence from an older brother — worth knowing before you start either one.
Where they differ
Westover’s real subject is knowledge itself. She grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist Mormon family that distrusted doctors, schools and the government, never set foot in a classroom, and got herself to Brigham Young University, then to Cambridge and a doctorate in history. What the book is actually about is what happens to a mind when the people who love you insist your memory of events is wrong, and what it costs to acquire a way of knowing that puts you outside the family. Walls’s subject is loyalty and shame. Her childhood was poverty, an alcoholic father, a mother who would not take conventional work, constant moving, and eventually a house in West Virginia with no plumbing — and she writes it with humour and an almost stubborn tenderness, staying close to the child’s eye view rather than analysing it from a distance. Westover explains; Walls remembers.
Which to read first
Educated, if you are choosing one — it is the more ambitious book and the questions it raises stay with you longer. Read The Glass Castle first if you want the more companionable of the two, or if the analytic register of Educated sounds like more than you want right now. They work well one after the other; give yourself a gap.
Read Educated if
You want the book about what changing your mind costs when the price is your family.
Read the summary →Read The Glass Castle if
You want the book about carrying parents who never stopped choosing the life that harmed you, told with humour and without bitterness.
Read the summary →Common questions
Should I read Educated or The Glass Castle?
Read Educated for the sharper and more ambitious book about what it costs to leave a family’s version of reality, and The Glass Castle for the warmer one about loving parents who kept failing you. Both are memoirs of childhood neglect, so pick knowing that.
What is the difference between Educated and The Glass Castle?
Westover’s real subject is knowledge itself. She grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist Mormon family that distrusted doctors, schools and the government, never set foot in a classroom, and got herself to Brigham Young University, then to Cambridge and a doctorate in history. What the book is actually about is what happens to a mind when the people who love you insist your memory of events is wrong, and what it costs to acquire a way of knowing that puts you outside the family. Walls’s subject is loyalty and shame. Her childhood was poverty, an alcoholic father, a mother who would not take conventional work, constant moving, and eventually a house in West Virginia with no plumbing — and she writes it with humour and an almost stubborn tenderness, staying close to the child’s eye view rather than analysing it from a distance. Westover explains; Walls remembers.
Which should I read first, Educated or The Glass Castle?
Educated, if you are choosing one — it is the more ambitious book and the questions it raises stay with you longer. Read The Glass Castle first if you want the more companionable of the two, or if the analytic register of Educated sounds like more than you want right now. They work well one after the other; give yourself a gap.
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