This is Not the Ivy League by Mary Clearman Blew is Blew’s behind-the-scenes memoir of pursuing a career at a time when a women’s place in the world was supposed to have limits. Her education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband.

It is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman—pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s.

This Is Not the Ivy League was recently reviewed by The New York Times. Louisa Thomas says that it “…broadly framed as Blew’s coming of age as a young professor in a claustrophobic place. But that’s not what it really is. Blew’s memoir is a kind of anti-memoir — an incredulous account, a catalog of confusion.”

Thomas also says “it can be frustrating to read. Then again, there’s something fascinating about the notion of the anti-memoir. Paradoxically, it’s honest.”

Read the full review here.