My Unsentimental Education
by Debra Monroe
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Pub Date Oct 01 2015 | Archive Date Sep 18 2015
Description
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.
Advance Praise
“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 . . . 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
“Funny, beguiling, poignant, deeply human . . . The accidental and
mistaken matter, too, Debra Monroe says. They are a part of our curious
alchemy of self, an alchemy that’s felt in each ecstatic line of her
prose.”
—Scott Blackwood, author of See How Small
“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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780820348742 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
