My Unsentimental Education

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.

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 *

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 *

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 *

A warm recounting of a bumpy journey to surprising success . . . Monroe's candid memoir reads like a country ballad: a down-and-out woman, working at gritty jobs, gets entangled with Mr. Completely, Laughably Wrong. . . . But her unexpected story is far from a cliché.

* Kirkus 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 *

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

* Austin Chronicle *

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 Tribu