Tara Westover's Passage to India, Richard Bachman's The Running Man, '80s Arnold is peak television
Richard Bachman is Stephen King! (gasp!)
Hello, and happy Sunday!
Tara Westover’s Passage to India
During the pandemic, the members of this book club found solace in books. We doubled down on reading fiercely as if to exert control over one of the few things in our lives we could. One of the group members suggested that we double our reading plans and insert a classic novel for every modern read. So we met on Zoom once every two weeks and discovered or revisited some of the books on the famous top 100 lists of books you should read before you die.
I wouldn’t have come to read some of the books we read during those two years, between 2020 and 2021. One of the books we read in 2021, in between the classic The Count of Monte Cristo and Dracula, was Tara Westover’s Educated.
It was a read that left a profound mark on us as readers and people in different ways. I remember feeling so much rage and discomfort physically while going through it. To keep going, I created a book club kit, one of the few, to keep me occupied and focused on it as a book rather than someone’s real-life story.
Tara Westover's memoir Educated is a heartbreaking account of her journey from a sheltered, isolated upbringing in rural Idaho to earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Published in 2018, the book has amassed widespread acclaim and spent over 130 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.
It opened my eyes to a side of the US I hadn’t fully acknowledged. Born to survivalist Mormon parents, Tara grew up without formal education, medical care, or government documentation. To this day, she doesn’t know her actual birth date because she only received a birth certificate nine years later, and no one remembered the date exactly. Her father, Gene, was deeply paranoid about government interference and insisted on self-sufficiency, while her mother, Faye, worked as an herbalist and midwife.
Despite the challenges of her unconventional childhood, including physical and emotional abuse from her brother Shawn, Tara’s thirst for knowledge led her to teach herself enough to gain admission to Brigham Young University at 17. Her journey through higher education was fraught with difficulties as she struggled to adapt to formal schooling and reconcile her new worldview with her family's beliefs.
As she pursued her education, earning degrees from BYU, Cambridge, and Harvard, she faced increasing conflict with her family. Her efforts to confront the abuse she suffered and assert her independence led to estrangement from most of her relatives.
Educated is a beautifully written, emotionally charged memoir that explores themes of family, identity, and the transformative power of education. Tara’s prose is both raw and eloquent, drawing readers into her extraordinary life story. It’s hard to keep going, but the writing won’t let you put the book down. The author's ability to present a balanced perspective is admirable. She includes footnotes acknowledging differing memories of events and strives to portray her family members with complexity rather than as simple villains, which would be much easier.
I hadn’t heard Tara Westover’s name in a while, though I sometimes think about her and her life story. A few days ago, she published an essay in The New Yorker that caught my eye, and I read it on the spot.
It didn’t escape me that the title of the article was Tara Westover’s Passage to India, and it reminded me of the year we read classics and her book was sandwiched between them. It also made me chuckle to think that the only classic book I included in our reading list for the year is A Passage to India.
Tara Westover's essay is actually titled A Visit to Madam Bedi and was published in The New Yorker on February 10, 2025. The story begins with Westover's initial reluctance to accept Sukrit's offer to stay with his mother in Delhi.
I could not imagine why I would go to a country that was not my country, to live with a mother who was not my mother.
At the time, she was estranged from her own family and hoped for reconciliation, particularly with her father. After a year of waiting for contact from her father, Tara finally agreed to the trip.
She explores Delhi and observes Madam Bedi's strength and influence throughout her stay. She reflects on her own past, attempting to reconcile her feelings about her family through a gratitude journal, which instead reignites her anger.
No one had ever told me that delusion is not a nutrient, that you cannot build a true future from a false past.
The Running Man, by Richard Bachman
In his early career days, Stephen King adopted the pseudonym Richard Bachman to publish a series of novels that would later become known as the Bachman Books. These works, written between 1977 and 1982, showcase a rawer, more unfiltered side of King's writing, and they constitute a delicacy for the Constant Readers, the King fans.
In The Importance of Being Bachman, the prefaces to the new editions, Stephen King reflects on how writing as Richard Bachman allowed him a certain freedom in his craft. He describes the Bachman persona as a way to explore different aspects of writing. He describes Bachman as “a sheltered place where I could publish a few early books which I felt readers might like.” He calls him “the vampirish side of my existence,” suggesting a darker, less restrained aspect of his writing, which I believe is noticeable if you’ve read any of his other work.
King states that Bachman “became a kind of id for me; he said the things I couldn’t [... he is] simultaneously funnier and more cold-hearted”. King mentions that writing as Bachman was “immensely exhilarating”, and he explains that “The importance of being Bachman was always the importance of finding a good voice and a valid point of view that were a little different from my own.” No wonder he was pissed off when his cover was blown!
The collection includes four novels: Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man. Last night, I finished the third novel in this series, The Running Man, which I learned was adapted for TV in 1987 and starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I am slowly making my way through the famous checklist. I read The Running Man now because its action takes place in 2025, in a dystopian, cyberpunk future. The author wrote the book in three weeks, just days before I was born, so I somehow felt connected to its existence.
America is obsessed with the Free-Vee where nothing that is being presented is true, and facts are bent to suit the government’s agenda. So, somehow, maybe not that far from the 2025 we inhabit.
I took great pleasure in reading it, and its ending is epic and suitable.
I can’t say the same about watching the TV adaptation last night. I wouldn’t have sat through it in a million years, and the story had almost nothing to do with the book. But ‘80s Arnold is Arnold at his best, so the nostalgia was real!
