Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like Educated
Educated is not a book about resilience. That is how people describe it, but I think that misses what makes it extraordinary. It is a book about epistemology — about how we know what we know, and what happens when the system that taught you everything turns out to have been lying. Tara Westover did not just escape her family. She had to dismantle an entire version of reality and build a new one with almost no tools and no one to help her hold it. The books on this list ask the same question from different angles: what does it cost to become someone your origins did not plan for?
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Memoir & Fiction · Updated May 2026
The Glass Castle
Walls grew up in a family that moved constantly, lived in poverty, and operated according to the logic of a father who was brilliant, charismatic, and completely unable to function. She writes about her childhood without sentimentality and without resolution — her parents end up homeless in New York, she ends up a journalist with a Park Avenue apartment, and neither of them can quite explain the other.
Every list of books like Educated includes this one, and every list is right. But most of them include it for the wrong reason — because it is also a memoir about a difficult childhood. The deeper connection is structural: both Westover and Walls spent their adult lives trying to hold two incompatible things at once — love for the family that failed them, and the knowledge that something was deeply wrong. That tension is the book. Not the poverty. Not the survival. The inability to stop loving people who hurt you.
I’m Glad My Mom Died
McCurdy was a child actress whose mother controlled everything — her diet, her career, her identity, her sense of what was normal. The memoir is written with jarring precision about what it feels like to be shaped by someone else’s need, to not know where they end and you begin, and to grieve a person who caused the damage even after they are gone.
This is not on most books-like-Educated lists, and it should be. What McCurdy describes — the process of unlearning a reality that someone you loved built for you — is exactly what Westover describes. Different circumstances, same mechanism. The book is also formally extraordinary: the way McCurdy writes about her mother manages to be simultaneously merciless and heartbroken. That combination is rare and it is what makes Educated last. It is what makes this last too.
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog
Perry is a child psychiatrist who spent decades working with children who had survived extreme neglect, abuse, and trauma. This book tells their stories and explains, with both clinical precision and real tenderness, what happens to a developing brain when the environment it needs to grow in does not exist. It is the most important book on this list that nobody puts on a books-like-Educated list.
If you read Educated and found yourself asking — how did she not know, why did it take so long, how can someone be that intelligent and still not see it — this book answers those questions. Perry explains what trauma does to the brain’s capacity to process reality, to trust its own perceptions, to imagine that things could be different. It is not a judgment on Westover. It is an explanation. And it will change how you read the memoir if you go back to it.
Know My Name
Miller was known to the world as “Emily Doe” — the anonymous victim in a sexual assault case that became a public event. This memoir is about what it cost to exist inside that story, to have your identity defined by something that happened to you, and to take it back. She is an extraordinary writer — precise, funny, devastating — and the book is less about the assault than about the years of fighting to become legible to yourself again.
Educated is a book about reclaiming authorship over your own story. So is this one. Miller and Westover ask the same question from different starting points: what do you do when the narrative that defines you was written by someone else? Both books are, at their core, about the labour of becoming the person who gets to say who you are. That labour is long, and both writers show every step of it.
Shuggie Bain
Shuggie Bain grows up in 1980s Glasgow with a mother he loves completely and cannot save. The novel follows him across years of poverty, shame, and devotion — devoted not because his mother is good to him but because she is his, and because the love a child has for a parent has almost nothing to do with whether they deserve it. Stuart won the Booker Prize for this. He deserved it.
I include a fiction book on this list because Shuggie Bain does something Educated cannot — it puts you inside the experience of the child who stays rather than the one who leaves. Reading it beside Westover’s memoir is clarifying: it shows you the gravitational pull of the world she came from, the thing she was resisting when she chose to go. The love for a parent who is also a source of harm — both books are about nothing else.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the book that is closest to Educated in structure and emotional register
→ Start with The Glass Castle. Walls does what Westover does: she writes about her parents with love and without excuses, simultaneously. If you found the balance in Educated hard to hold, Walls will show you it can be done twice.
If you want to understand the psychology behind what you read in Educated
→ Read The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog. Perry explains what Westover could not fully explain about herself. It is the book that makes everything in the memoir make sense.
If you want the same emotional precision in a completely different setting
→ Read I’m Glad My Mom Died. McCurdy’s memoir is shorter, faster, and formally unlike Educated — but the interior experience it describes is almost identical.
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From the bookshelf
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” — Kierkegaard
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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