My Unsentimental Education - Paperback

by Debra Monroe (Author)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career--if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she's still bluecollar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as "liberated."

Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us "to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn't. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began.

Front Jacket

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers but never quite leaves her past behind. When it comes to men, she s still blue collar. Negotiating the world of dating, Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a woman ambivalent about her newfound status as liberated.

Both the story of her steady rise into the professional class and a parallel history of unsuitable exes, this memoir reminds us how accidental even a good life can be. If Joan Didion advises us to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, Monroe takes this advice a step further and nods at the people she might have become but didn t. Funny, poignant, wise, My Unsentimental Education explores the confusion that ensues when a working-class girl ends up far from where she began."

Back Jacket

This picaresque memoir of a woman with brains and desires (not always operating in unison) is a joy. It tracks a runaway life with consummate control and aphoristic wit.
Phillip Lopate

Debra Monroe is a terrifically acute observer of the two worlds of women: her mother s generation corseted in sexual and familial constraints; her own, in which lovers and addresses shift with the wind. She is able, in other words, to make just as many mistakes, only different ones. My Unsentimental Education is very funny, not least at Monroe s own expense, and it raises a dozen potent questions about what has changed for a generation of women not so much disillusioned as unillusioned about what it means to live like a man.
Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart

Through a series of near pratfalls and sheer acrobatic strength, Debra Monroe integrates the schisms of taught identity a bumpy, if not bumptious, education shared by many, a charismatic story at once wildly entertaining, buoyant, and wise.
Melissa Pritchard, author of Palmerino

CRUX logo

The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org

ISBN 978-0-8203-4874-2"

Author Biography

DEBRA MONROE is the author of The Source of Trouble, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is also the author of the short story collection A Wild, Cold State; two novels, Newfangled and Shambles; two memoirs, On the Outskirts of Normal and My Unsentimental Education (both Georgia); and the essay collection It Takes a Worried Woman (Georgia). She is the editor of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University.