“A curious thing happens when you offer up your life for public consumption: People start to interpret your biography, to explain to you what they think it means.”
Tara Westover, who grew up in Idaho and wrote the bestselling memoir, “Educated,” has penned an extended essay for the New York Times that challenges one of the main perceptions people have of her life story.
“I’m told, “You are living proof of the American dream, that absolutely anything is possible for anybody,” she writes.
But am I? Is that what the story means?”
Calling that view a “fashionable old fable,” Westover goes on to recount the ways in which she was helped in college, and where she sees failings and inequities in the system today.
I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with Ms. Westover, and enjoy her forthrightness. I hope you can read her piece here, and I look forward to what’s next from her.
– Marcia Franklin, producer and host of Dialogue