Jonathon Messinger speaks with Deb Olin Unferth about retracing her romanitic follies in South American war zones

When she was 18, Deb Olin Unferth dropped out of college and followed her boyfriend, George, to Central America. The idea was to support the populist uprisings in countries like El Salvador. But once there, Unferth found her efforts ineffective and her life rudderless. The Wesleyan professor talked to us from her home in New York about her new book Revolution, liberation theology and being young, dumb and in love.

This happened more than 20 years ago. What made you decide to write the book now?
I had been trying to figure out a way to write it for a long time. I had a lot of doubts about the genre of memoir; I didn’t know if it was intellectually solid. I kept trying; I wrote many, many drafts of a novel. I wrote it as a spy thriller set in Central America with multiple shootings and deaths. I tried to write it as essays, stories, none of it worked. I eventually read some memoirs and realised that it’s a fantastic form and it’s very new, so it’s a very exciting genre.

Did you find it difficult to access your 18-year-old self and give that self credit?
It was hard. I have journals from that time. Reading them is so painful for me. The whole time I’m saying, “You’re an idiot, stop that!” That comes out quite a bit in the book, that I’m constantly second-guessing myself, and at some points in the book I’m saying to myself, “Be patient. Quit yelling at this poor 18-year-old girl who’s trying to figure things out.”

You seem kind of unimpressed by the story. At one point you write, “I was eighteen. That’s the whole story.”
It was such a formative story for me, personally. But when I think about what those people in those countries were going through, the acts of heroism they were committing – like in Egypt today – and then I was bumbling down to Central America with my boyfriend, it makes me not want to take myself too seriously. I had to take the whole story seriously, I kept returning to it and returning to it. But I didn’t want to take myself too seriously.

Did you have an urge to do straight reportage about what was going on?
Not while I was there. But later I wanted to, and when I went back to Central America I interviewed a lot of people, including some of the people I interviewed before. I wanted to write some sort of set of essays about the state of liberation theology ten years later. But it turns out, I’m not very good at that, I don’t know how to do that. [Revolution] is extremely well researched, though I didn’t want that to be at the forefront.

You were pretty miserable from the outset. Has your view of your time there changed?
Misery always fades over time. I’ve been miserable a few times in my life. Sometimes the misery was physical, emotional. When I think about the things I’ve written about, they are always about the miserable times in my life. Those times of misery create emotion and narrative, and made me the person I am.

You tried to get in touch with George to no avail before the book was published. What if he’d raised objections?
I don’t know, it depends on the basis of his objection. If his objection was that there was something inaccurate, well, memory is of course porous, there are going to be mistakes in there and I don’t know what they are. But now it’s too late. I gave you an opportunity. Tough luck, man.

Revolution is Unferth’s third book and is published by Henry Holt and Co.