My Unsentimental Education: A Memoir

by Debra Monroe

Overview

A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of "many delights" (Atlanta Journal Constitution).
 
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.
 
"Trying to be a Midwestern housewife in the tradition of her mother and grandmothers, and an early feminist at the same time, makes for comic incongruity."—Wisconsin State Journal
 
"Monroe's candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong. But her unexpected story is far from a cliché." —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820348735
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	10/07/2020
Series:	Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	217
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Debra Monroe is the author of two story collections,two novels, and two memoirs, including On the Outskirts of Normal, which received national acclaim. She has won many awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her essays and stories have appeared in many venues, including The Southern Review, Guernica, The American Scholar, Salon.com, and the New York Times, and they are regularly listed as "Notable" in Best American Essays.

Editorial Reviews

Debra Monroe’s blue-collar-to-academia memoir My Unsentimental Education is as well-written as it is wise.

Austin Chronicle - Joe O'Connell

Funny, elegiac, beguiling, poignant, and deeply human, Debra Monroe’s memoir stitches together the disparate parts of a life. The accidental and mistaken matter too. They are a part of our curious alchemy of self, an alchemy that's felt in each ecstatic line of her prose.

author of We Agreed to Meet Just Here and See How Small - Scott Blackwood

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.

author of The Odditorium and Palmerino - Melissa Pritchard

Impressively well-written, exceptionally well-organized and presented, My Unsentimental Education is a candid and thoroughly absorbing read from beginning to end, making it very highly recommended for both community and academic library American Biography collections.

Midwest Book Review - Margaret Lane

While this book is engaging as an account of its author's intellectual and occupational awakening as well as her adventures—or misadventures, really—in sex and relationships, it is above all a love story, but with poetry and fiction more than with any person, and that's what makes it a pleasure to read. Monroe's enthusiasm for literature is contagious, and she writes, delightfully, like someone who not only reads but who has made a study of reading.

Chicago Tribune - Kathleen Rooney

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 her 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.'

author of Cora Fry, Tender Mercies, and Half a Heart - Rosellen Brown

“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

“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

From the Publisher

2015-08-17
A warm recounting of a bumpy journey to surprising success. In some ways, Monroe's (English/Texas State Univ.; On the Outskirts of Normal: Forging a Family Against the Grain, 2010, etc.) candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working at gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong; the brakes on her pickup truck repeatedly fail; she lives in one grungy apartment after another. But her unexpected story is far from a cliché. With no particular direction in her life, she started college, first aiming for an associate degree and then deciding to go on—and on, finally earning a doctorate. Despite her father's warning that she would become un-marriageable, she came to realize that education "makes you good company for yourself." Being alone with her books, though, was not all she wanted. At 24, she married a musician with "faux-bucolic ideals and soundtrack to match." After speedily divorcing him, she became pregnant by a man happy to marry her. By the time of the wedding, she had had a miscarriage and realized, too, that her husband was a slacker with grandiose plans, a violent temper, and a penchant for lying. Although they stayed together too long and Monroe had to support them both, she was determined to complete her degree and creative writing dissertation. Not only did she graduate, but her stories won a prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for work, the judges said, that "comprised a world, an iconography." She then found a teaching position at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, moving to Texas State University in 1992. Monroe lightly sketches her adopted African-American daughter, the subject of her last memoir, and she celebrates her happy third marriage to a man "who knew that running a tidy, books-balanced household where my child came first was as important, or more important, than my career." A modest, spirited, and sometimes-captivating memoir.

Kirkus Reviews