My Unsentimental Education: A Memoir (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)
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- Synopsis
- 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
- Copyright:
- 2015
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 217 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9780820348735
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780820348742
- Publisher:
- University of Georgia Press
- Date of Addition:
- 09/16/23
- Copyrighted By:
- The University of Georgia Press
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Biographies and Memoirs, Social Studies
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.