September 16, 2026 Post by : Editorial Memoir and Non-Fiction

There are memoirs you admire and memoirs you survive alongside. Tara Westover's Educated is the second kind. It is the story of a girl raised in rural Idaho by survivalist parents, kept out of school, treated at home with herbal tinctures for burns and head injuries, and eventually admitted to Brigham Young University, then Cambridge, then Harvard. The facts are dramatic. The writing is calm. That contrast is what makes it so hard to put down.

Westover does not write like someone settling scores. She writes like someone trying to understand, and the uncertainty in her voice is the book's greatest strength. She flags when her memory is unreliable. She notes when her brothers remember things differently. She lets the reader sit in the fog with her rather than handing over a tidy conclusion.

Why Lapsang Souchong Fits

Lapsang Souchong is a black tea dried over pinewood fires. It tastes like a campfire, like smoke clinging to a jacket. It is not a subtle drink, and Educated is not a subtle book. Both are bracing. Both leave a mark on the room after you have finished with them.

The connection goes deeper than the surface drama, though. Westover's father stockpiles fuel and food for an apocalypse he believes is coming. The smoke of Lapsang is the smoke of that preparation, of a household organised around fear and self-reliance. Drinking it while reading her account of the junkyard, the midwifery, the car crashes, and the slow, painful climb toward an education is a way of keeping your senses in the world she is describing.

Brew it at a lower temperature than you might expect, around 90 degrees Celsius, for three minutes. Boiling water can make it bitter. Milk and sugar are optional but not traditional; I take mine plain, because the smoke is the point.

Reading It Without Flinching

This is not a book to rush. Westover's account of her brother's violence, her parents' refusal to intervene, and her own years of self-doubt is difficult. The tea helps in a practical way: it gives your hands something to do and your mouth something to focus on when a paragraph lands hard. It is also, I think, thematically right. Lapsang is a tea that asks you to sit with something strong rather than dilute it.

Read it in daylight if you can. Read it with a notebook nearby. Read it knowing that the ending is not a rescue so much as a decision, and that Westover's decision to walk away from her family is not presented as a triumph but as a cost. That honesty is why the book has stayed with so many readers.

Pair it with a second cup on the day you finish. You will probably need one.

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