Books Like Educated

Why Each Pick

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The closest match. Jeannette Walls grew up with a brilliant, unpredictable father and an artist mother who left the children to fend for themselves, moving from desert towns to a poor West Virginia coal town, often without enough to eat. Like Westover, she gets out, builds a career in New York and stays bound to the parents she left. It is less about religion and more about poverty and drinking.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Another memoir of a childhood that seemed unlikely to produce the adult telling it. Trevor Noah grew up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa, where his birth was illegal, raised by a fiercely religious and determined mother. Like Educated, it is about outgrowing the rules of the world you were born into. It is much funnier, though it includes domestic violence, and the family bond is loving rather than broken.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

For readers moved by education as a way forward. Michelle Obama describes growing up in a small apartment on Chicago's South Side, then Princeton, Harvard Law School and eventually the White House, and the feeling of not belonging in elite places. Her family is warm and steady, the opposite of Westover's, so it reads as an encouraging story rather than a painful one. It runs 448 pages.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Another reflective memoir about how learning shapes a life. Paul Kalanithi studied English literature and biology, trained as a neurosurgeon and was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36, when he began writing about what makes life meaningful. It is short, at 256 pages, and about illness and death rather than family, but it shares Educated's clear, thoughtful voice and its respect for hard-won knowledge.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

For readers interested in the gap between a family and the institutions that shape its life. Rebecca Skloot tells how a Black woman's cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 and became central to medicine, and follows her daughter Deborah's struggle to understand the science. Like Westover, Deborah teaches herself a new world from the outside. It is journalism, not memoir, and also covers race and medical ethics.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

A novel with the same outline as Educated. Kya Clark raises herself alone in the North Carolina marshes after her family leaves, learns to read late and becomes an expert naturalist. Like Westover, she grows up outside school and society and is marked by a violent father. It is fiction, with a murder mystery and a love story, and moves at a gentler pace.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction set in a different corner of rural America. Demon is born to a teenage mother in a trailer in Appalachian Virginia and is passed through foster care, farm labor and the opioid crisis, and his sharp, funny voice carries the book. Like Educated, it shows a child failed by the adults and systems around him. It is long, at 548 pages, and includes drug addiction and abuse.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

For readers who connected with Westover's struggle to hold herself together at elite universities. Esther Greenwood, a gifted scholarship student, wins a summer post at a New York magazine and slides into a severe depression. Plath's only novel is semi-autobiographical and set in the 1950s, with no family estrangement story, and it is darker. Content note: suicide attempt and psychiatric treatment.