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. 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.

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

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

ISBN 978-0-8203-4874-2"