My unsentimental education
By: Debra Monroe
Series: Georgia series in literary nonfiction
Publisher: The University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 199
ISBN-13: 9780820348742
Subjects: Man-woman relationships; Working class families; Single mothers; Relations with men; American Authors; Working class women; American Women authors; Sex role; Biography
Description: "A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, another, and builds a career--if only because her plans to be a Midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Her professional life improves because she's good at 'hard-core feigning.' 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. Monroe pays careful attention to what love and sex mean to a 'liberated' woman: to the pressure to be assertive yet not too assertive; to different prices women pay for being 'sultry-powerful' or 'brainy-powerful.' 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"--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Prologue; title: History and practical math; title: Regional trades; title: On the down-low; title: Drinks are on the house; title: Intermission; title: In the event of an apocalypse; title: Serfs and landlords; title: Depredating deer; title: A dress rehearsal; title: Epilogue.