The Road from Coorain

This is one of the books that touched off the memoir craze. Jill Ker Conway grew up on a isolated sheep station in the Australian outback during the 1950's, eventually growing up become the president of Smith college and later MIT. Her family life was less than ideal, in part because as a brilliant and intellectual girl, her family and particularly her mother, had no idea of how handle her. Conway is deeply isolated both on the Coorain, and later in Sydney where she eventually attends school. Beautifully written and a nice corrective to too much 1950's nostalgia. There are two sequels, True North, and A Woman's Education.