“The Distance … That Had Been Traversed”: Education, Identity, and Public Literacy in Tara Westover’s Educated and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory

These two memoirs of American higher education represent higher education and advanced literacy as forces of social division, dividing their writers from their families and origins, and leaving unformulated a vision of higher education that might unify or elevate the American collective. Yet, the texts suggest a pedagogical possibility that life writing might serve as a via media between scholarship and popular writing that teacher-scholars might use to help our own students find in reflective education not only rupture and challenge, but also continuity and the possibility of return.