How do you end up with a PhD in history having never stepped into a classroom before age

17?

Tara Westover joins us to talk about her best-selling memoir, Educated.

What was it like watching movies with our movie star president?

Mark Weinberg will be here to discuss his new book, Movie Nights with the Regans.

Plus, our critics' Dwight Garner, Parle Sagole, and Jen Celay will join us to talk about

the latest in literary criticism.

This is Inside the New York Times Book Review.

I'm Pamela Paul.

Tara Westover joins us now from Cambridge.

She is the author of a new already best-selling memoir, Educated.

Tara, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

So, this has been an incredible success.

New York Times best-sell are now, I think, three or four weeks.

And it's a debut book.

How did you decide to turn your own personal story into a memoir?

Well, I had had this kind of difficult experience with my family where I had to come estranged

from half my family.

And that had a lot to do with my father's kind of unique brand of radicalism.

I was raised in because of seven children, not a mountain, an Idaho.

And my dad was kind of this charismatic radical who was opposed to a lot of the institutions

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