NONFICTION
“My Unsentimental Education”
Debra Monroe
The University of Georgia Press
$24.95, 256 pages
Debra Monroe — successful university professor, wife, mother and award-winning author — may look like the perfect role model, but in her second memoir, she begs to differ. If she’s done it all, it’s not because she “made an appealing life blueprint and followed through.” Instead, “My Unsentimental Education” charts her scrappy, determined climb out of rural Spooner, Wis., population 2,234, and again reveals Monroe as a writer who tackles her past with the sharp eye and unadorned voice of an anthropologist.
Young Debra, a voracious reader, once filled out a checklist, “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up,” that “listed Mother as the first Girls’ option, followed by Nurse, Teacher, Secretary, and Stewardess.” Skipping over those, she liked the last option, “a blank labeled Other,” and “the infinity of possible futures” it represented.
While not a prize student, she decided early on that education could be her saving grace: “School would be a story leading me toward The End. An escalator lifting me.” Away from Spooner.
Marriage was the pinnacle of success in her family, where girls learned as teenagers that “the world was designed for husbands.” One grandmother rebelled, only to be dragged home to milk the cows, birth the children. Had Monroe stuck to the plan, she might have suffered a similar if updated fate, she says, picturing herself as “a small-town waitress, divorced, with grown children… haughty with boredom.”
Perhaps, she implies, she inherited the rebel gene. Though by age 15 she’d decided on the man she’d marry — “in a few years, I’d be like my mother, only younger, with modish dresses and silver eye shadow”— she opts for birth control pills, storing her one-year supply in her boyfriend’s tool locker.
After attending a writer’s camp where her “favorite subject was every class,” her old life pinches: boyfriend Rodney dubs her “Miss Poem” and puts her in a headlock when she tries to break up with him. Moving on to Eau Claire University, she crafts a self, a “piecemeal life, ragged stitches between phases” that she still hopes will include marriage — if possible, to a husband able to “discuss John Donne, the history of English language, Aristotle, ‘The Selected Poems of Garcia Lorca.’”
Unfortunately, the strain of pretending to be someone she’s not (yet) leaves her too drained to make educated romantic choices. “Because dating up was work,” she writes, “I usually dated down… I chose men as if I’d never left home.” One husband deserts her; another one hits. When there’s no money to escape, her hometown waitressing experience comes in handy.
Downplaying the fallout from early conditioning — “even a dud husband was better than no husband” — and plotting her escape from the duds, Monroe stubbornly plows through grad school, finishes the draft of her dissertation, a collection of short stories, and keeps trading up. She walks like a feminist, just doesn’t talk the talk yet: “I wasn’t a pioneer either,” she says, “just a particle in that mass wave of women entering” universities during an era when women were becoming equal to men. But back in Wisconsin, “we’d all been raised in homes where women weren’t.”
Monroe establishes the friction between two selves pulling in opposite directions through the blunt, no-nonsense style of her first memoir, “On the Outskirts of Normal.” With unwavering honesty and flashes of sly humor, she describes how, while the Spooner left hand continues to launch her toward Mr. Wrong and domestic drudgery, the right hand clings to the life raft of academic advancement with a steady, iron grip.
Among the many delights of the book are the passages in which Monroe high-steps through these dangers and comes out unscathed; it’s like watching Wonder Woman fend off attacks with her magic bracelets. When her mother’s abusive husband calls Monroe “the last dirty word in the English language,” she counters with a polite lecture on its “respectable history” and appearance in “the Wife of Bath’s Prologue” from Chaucer.
This same regal temperament ferries her through the perils of “dating and mating,” relationship disasters Monroe likens to hurricanes: “Category 1. No damage, short delays. Category 2. Longer delays. Obvious escape routes cut off. Category 3. Small structures destroyed. Evacuation required…”
Behind these dispassionate observations, however, one senses the toll Monroe paid to weather the drama, the heavy load of her Wisconsin family baggage, the battle to be wife or mother (or both) while balancing the demands of teaching and academia. There’s a palpable longing for each metamorphosis to be her “last self,” the one that finally fits.
If in the end Monroe’s still looking over her shoulder, eyeing her near misses — “I could have been Rodney’s casserole-making wife, ex-wife or widow by now” — she also has few regrets. Now a teacher in the creative writing MFA program at Texas State University, she has a loving husband, two kids, a houseful of Midwestern doilies and her mother’s sewing table — “the best bits of the past, modified.”
Not only has the girl with the “vagrant heart but a sense of direction” grown up to be Other after all, but, she says, “I wouldn’t change the unsystematic approach by which I got to here.” After all, given a more reliable route, she might have missed the right turns.
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