Debra Monroe is the author of two story collections,two novels, and two memoirs, includingOn the Outskirts of Normal,which received national acclaim. She has won many awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her essays and stories have appeared in many venues, includingThe Southern Review,Guernica,The American Scholar,Salon.com,and theNew York Times, and they are regularly listed as "Notable" inBest American Essays.

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