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Sonja Livingston

Tales of female daredevils, warriors, killers, and victims: “Radiant essays inspired by ‘slivers and bits’ of real women's lives…Wise, fresh, captivating.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
 At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend, and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself.
 
 Livingston breathes life into subjects who led extraordinary lives—as rule-breakers, victims, or those whose differences made them cultural curiosities—bringing together those who slipped through the world largely unseen with those whose images were fleeting or faulty so that they, too, remained relatively obscure. Included are Alice Mitchell, a Memphis society girl who murdered her female lover in 1892; Maria Spelterini, who crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope in 1876; May Fielding, a “white slave girl” buried in a Victorian cemetery; Valaida Snow, a Harlem Renaissance trumpeter; a child exhibited as Darwin’s Missing Link; the sculptors’ model Audrey Munson; a Crow warrior; victims of a 1970s serial killer; the Fox Sisters; and many more.

University of Georgia Press

Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction

Ladies Night at the Dreamland

Debra Monroe

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

My Unsentimental Education: A Memoir