Educated

I learned in my psychology class that when you recall a memory, you are actually remembering the last time you remembered it. This was then used to point out that memories can often be skewed because they change over time. This was quite an intruiging concept to me, but something more interesting was the possibility of creating false memories. This is exactly what Tara Westover does in her memoir Educated. 

She says, "My strongest memory is not a memory. It's something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened." Her father keeps her trapped in their small remote community because of his distrust of government officials and because he doesn't allow Tara to go to school. And so one day, her father tells her a story about how the Feds surrounded their house and were preparing to kill/apprehend them. This story was told so vividly and repeated so often that Tara ended up thinking that it actually happened -- even though it was just a story told by her dad to make her fear the government.

Her father's oppressive and restrictive nature is reflected in this line because as a child, Tara could only believe the word of her father. She can't fact-check anything her father says because she doesn't have anything to fact-check it against. Tara barely meets anyone outside of her family, meaning that she isn't introduced to any new perspectives or ideas. 

In English class nowadays, reading a variety of things from a variety of perspectives is stressed because that is the only way you can start to formulate your own original opinions about various topics. However, Tara doesn't have this luxury, and so she is growing up not knowing what the real world is about.