Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth

This memoir is about something that would never, ever, happen to me. 

While in college in the late 1980's, Deb Olin Unfirth decides to drop out of school and follow her boyfriend to Central America.  They were in search of a revolution to join, and it wasn't until they arrived that they figured out how difficult it was to find politically significant work. 

The number of ways that is different from my life is barely countable.  Of course I would never have dropped out of school, particularly not to follow a guy, and I wouldn't have gone to Central America even if I had.  Sure, I like travel and have been to some parts of the world that other people would find risky, but not without my American passport (xeroxed, carried by me and my traveling companion, as well as stored in my Gmail account), credit card (safely xeroxed as well as alerted one week ahead of time to my international travel), and Immodium A/D (both in my daypack and back at the hotel).  That was not how Deb traveled.

Her story is the opposite of all that - she lived with complete uncertainty, hopeful to find some civil war to assist with, riddled with diarrhea and bug bites, expired visas and no money, and several other maladies that would have sent me home immediately.  She was also struggling to figure out her relationship with her boyfriend / fiance who proposes to her in El Salvador but seems to be lacking some of the earnest commitment she herself has. Her newfound Christianity further complicated her already-complex relationship with her otherwise typical Jewish American family.

I enjoyed this book and looked forward to reading it each night.  It's told somewhat non-linearly, not as a factual depiction of what happened, but as a reverie on her experiences.  In the later chapters, she also depicts her return to Central America on subsequent visits, inserting some space for reflection on her younger self.