My Unsentimental Education

by Debra Monroe

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820348742
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	10/01/2015
Series:	Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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.

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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