After ‘Educated,’ Tara Westover revisits a family split in memoir ‘Brothers and Sisters’

NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly 10 years after the publication of the million-selling “Educated,” Tara Westover is returning with a second memoir in which she reflects on the fallout from her celebrated and controversial debut.

Random House announced Thursday that “Brothers and Sisters” will come out on April 13. It’s her follow-up to “Educated,” which was released in 2018 and became one of the most talked-about memoirs of its time.

Westover’s account of growing up as the youngest of seven siblings in a Mormon survivalist family in Idaho, the physical abuse allegedly suffered at the hands of an older brother and her eventual break from her family spent more than two years on The New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list. Winning wide acclaim, it was chosen by the National Book Critics Circle as a finalist in two awards categories and praised by Bill Gates and former President Barack Obama, both of whom placed it on their lists of favorite books of 2018.

In “Brothers and Sisters,” Westover writes about her parents’ disputing her memories and her siblings denying events in “Educated” that they had previously confirmed. According to Random House, the new book considers questions such as “Who gets to say what happened?” and “How do you believe yourself when your parents say you’re lying?”

“’Brothers and Sisters’ is a story of how memories are held in a family. How someone can know you are telling the truth but still say you are lying,” the publisher’s announcement reads in part. “Ultimately, it is a story of what it means to grow up — to outlive the story that made you.”

Westover, who turns 40 later this month, was admitted to Brigham Young University as a scholarship student and later received a doctorate in intellectual history from Trinity College in Cambridge, England. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden awarded her a National Humanities Medal for serving “as a powerful example of how the humanities can set people — and a Nation — free.”