Monroe - My unsentimental education: a memoir

PRAISE FOR DEBRA MONROE

Fine and funky, marbled with warmth and romantic confusion, but not a hint of sentimentality.

Boston Globe

Rangy, thoughtful, ambitious, and widely, wildly knowledgeable.

Washington Post

Her characters, like her prose, have hard edges. They also have big hearts, dark humor, and purely unique ways of opening themselves up for our inspection. This book makes you want to take the author out for a drink and tell her your troubles.

ANTONYA NELSON

If this book were a country song, Lucinda Williams would sing it.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Prose that shimmers like a jazz solo.

JONIS AGEE

Her intelligence tilts the world and offers her every encounter an almost hysterical spin. In a [book] laden with trenchant notes on our new world, Debra Monroe offers us a lively quest a woman caught between the romantic and the semantic evaluates all the fangled possibilities for human connection.

RON CARLSON

Intelligent... deliciously wacky.

Publishers Weekly

My Unsentimental Education

John Griswold, series editor

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Dan Gunn

Pam Houston

Phillip Lopate

Dinty W. Moore

Lia Purpura

Patricia Smith

Ned Stuckey-French

Also by Debra Monroe

FICTION

The Source of Trouble

A Wild, Cold State

Newfangled

Shambles

NONFICTION

On the Outskirts of Normal

Debra Monroe

2015 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Set in by 11/14 Filosofia Regular

Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 c 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Monroe, Debra.

My unsentimental education / Debra Monroe.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8203-4874-2 (hardcover : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-0-8203-4873-5 (ebook)

1. Monroe, Debra. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. Women authors, American20th centuryBiography. 4. Working class womenUnited StatesBiography. 5. Single mothersUnited States Biography. 6. Monroe, DebraRelations with men. 7. Man-woman relationshipsUnited States. 8. Sex roleUnited States. 9. Working class familiesWisconsinSpooner. 10. Spooner (Wis.)Biography. I. Title.

PS3563.O5273Z46 2015

813.54dc23

[B]

2015005541

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

ANNIE DILLARD

My Unsentimental Education

Near the turn of the century, the recent turn, fragrant jasmine wafted and crowds of students milled. I sat on a bench near a bronzed statue of a young Lyndon B. Johnson carrying textbooks, his necktie flapping rigid as he strides toward his future. Hes the universitys most famous graduate, also known to have said, perhaps apocryphally: If it wasnt for public education Id still be looking at the ass end of a mule. If it werent for public education, I thought, Id be a small-town waitress, divorced with grown children by now, haughty with boredom. But I was forty-something, a professor with a baby daughter, and Miranda, a student I was about to teach, sat down next to me and told me that the new day, the new season, springtime, inspired her. Apropos of not much else, she said, Im glad to have such a modern role model. And I always admire your shoes too. I glanced at her sideways.

I didnt feel like a modern role model.

The faces of previous studentsJennifer, Alyssa, Melissa, Kim, Samantha, Anne, Whitneyreeled past. Theyd initiated parallel conversations. In my office, with books and papers stacked askew. Or, if spring had arrived, outside, like thissap rising, dull roots stirring (lilacs, desire), students passing in pairs. In one version, the conversation implied Id made an appealing life blueprint and followed through. In another version, Id sacrificed womanly longing for Great Literature. Neither account is true, Gentle Reader. But I never said so. Pretending life has progressed according to plan is part of anyones job. And once, when I was just two years older than a student named LucyI still remember her anxious, square-jawed face, how shed sublimated all her worries into a masters thesis about Victorian heroines too bluestocking to marryId even pretended at home.

Lucys parents didnt trust her judgment, shed explained, so theyd asked to meet me. I wasnt the first woman in what used to be a mostly male profession; I was part of that first mass wave of women entering it. Some of us used to correct our well-meaning elder colleagues who called us my dear and praised our hairdos, not our work. I didnt, though, having clocked in for years at jobs where correcting your superior got you fired.

Lucys parents stopped by my house, which Lucys mother reflexively praiseda rental house filled with eccentric used furniture. Lucys father shook my hand. Ah then, he said, youve answered my question already. Youre wearing a wedding ring. I nodded. At the time, I was at the tail-end of a grim starter marriage: my second. My husband would have been at work. Or so hed say. Sometimes he was. Planning how to extricate myself, how to divorce with the least fallout, was currently taking up more mental room than the book I needed to write to keep my brand-new good job. But I didnt volunteer that to Lucys parents. Publish or perish, I thought, pouring iced tea into tall glasses.

You publish and die anyway, hopefully later.

Married and a lady professor too, Lucys father said, smiling.

I smiled back. This was just one version of myself: temporary.

Id already been so many.

I moved away and got divorced. And now Miranda, whod grown up ten years later than Lucy, ten more years of seeing women in white-collar jobs, sat beside me. Her aunt had a career, she said. And she always has an exciting new boyfriend too, she added.

This aunt must live in a city, I thought. Or this was the public account of her private life. Or I was projecting. I wanted a man whod match my old self, my new self, all my selves.

So far Id met Either and Or.

Either. The night before, Id gotten back into bed with a moody jack-of-many-trades Id dated erratically for yearsbreakups, makeups, seeing him lately after dark as my daughter slept in another room, the baby monitor on my nightstand blinking green, serene, a cant-last-much-longer arrangement, true. But I couldnt change where I lived, half-rural, half-highbrow. The night before hed said he felt objectified. He hadnt even known what the word meant when Id met him, but he heard one of my friends say it and asked me to explain. I had, citing the standard complaint about