THE YEAR I FELL IN LOVE AND WENT TO JOIN THE WAR
AUTHOR | DEB OLIN UNFERTH
PUBLISHER | HENRY HOLT AND CO.
RELEASE | 2.1.11
To liberate the oppressed, turns out you need basic skills and some on-the-ground knowledge. Otherwise, your impromptu literacy classes at the orphanage will fail, as Deb Unferth’s did: “The children were too polite to tell me that they knew how to read … they sat there pretending not to.”
Unferth was only 18 in 1987 when her boyfriend George decided they should ditch college for the revolutions of Central America. He brought the passion and the anti-capitalist theories. She brought her passion for his theories. Together, they accomplished little. They interviewed a bunch of people. They got sick. They volunteered to assemble bicycles, were fired and ended up at the gringo bar with everyone else.
Writing a funny memoir about life in 1980s El Salvador and Nicaragua seems almost as foolish as going there, but hey, Revolution is funny. And brushes with the real shit—midnight bus searches, armed adolescents—add a deeper futility to the bumbling. Unferth makes no excuses for her young self. When she and George get home, their bag of interview tapes sits by the apartment door, unplayed.
UNFERTH READS AT THE BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH ON TUE 3.15.11
