Educated

Tara never meets her maternal grandmother, Faye's mother, in the memoir; she died before Tara's birth. Faye does tell her daughter many stories about her own mother, though. In Chapter 3, Tara has a flashback to one of these stories, hearing about her grandmother as a young girl. Getting ready to leave for church, Faye tells Tara that standards of hygiene were very different with her grandmother:

One telling in particular has stayed with me. I am seven or eight and am in my room dressing for church. I have taken a damp rag to my face, hands and feet, scrubbing only the skin that will be visible. Mother watches me pass a cotton dress over my head, which I have chosen for its long sleeves so I won’t have to wash my arms, and a jealousy lights her eyes.

“If you were Grandma’s daughter,” she says, “we’d have been up at the crack of dawn preening your hair."

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