Learning to Think.: A memoir about faith, demons, and the courage to ask questions

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The most exciting memoir to launch in 2024 - Educated meets Lowborn and more - a stunning coming-of-age story. Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope. Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but it was marked by debt, by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia. When her father died at the hands of a local teenage gang on the streets of their Midlands council estate, superstition gave way to a deeper and more dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which Tracy and her family belonged. In the chaos of loss, the paranormal became paranoia. In a bid to find definitive answers, Tracy followed one belief system after another until, accidentally, she stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself. And it was only when she applied the tools of critical thinking to this exploration of her past that she uncovered a very different kind of story. Learning to Think is a memoir about belief. It's about poverty, religion and superstition, grief and healing. But most of all, it's about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.

Reviews

King's memoir is heartbreaking and hopeful; a devastating true story that teaches us how the pursuit of knowledge can be a path to both freedom and breathtaking grace. -- Tim Minchin
A raw and unflinching account of growing up in poverty which tackles the false narratives we tell ourselves to survive. -- Caroline Criado Perez
A brilliant writer -- Adam Kay

Author Bio

Tracy King is a writer, producer and science communicator based in England. She has contributed to media on subjects ranging from science and technology to politics and videogames, for the BBC and in the Guardian, Telegraph, the New Statesman, Stylist and the New European amongst others. She was a columnist for Custom PC magazine for over ten years. Her science and critical-thinking animations include a collaboration with Tim Minchin, Storm, which has five million views on YouTube and was adapted into a bestselling graphic novel. Her television and radio credits include Sky News, BBC Newsnight, Good Morning Britain and BBC Sounds.