Deb Olin Unferth used to have a problem with goals. “I never had access to normal values, like how to be successful or have satisfying jobs,” says the 35-year-old writer. “I was against goals; I felt like pointing yourself in a direction was so American, so simpleminded.”
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Unferth grew up in Chicago and the northern suburbs; her father was a Chicago landlord who once, when she was very young, took the family on a road trip to Mexico and Central America. She read a lot as a kid, but in high school she was more interested in hanging out with her boyfriend, an older guy in a band. It wasn’t until she got to the University of Colorado that, in her own words, she “really blossomed,” immersing herself in Kierkegaard and Calvin. She became “an existentialist Christian,” got into liberation theology, and in 1987 she dropped out of school to go to Central America with another boyfriend, without telling her parents. “I think we had a total of $2,000,” she says.
She graduated from Colorado in 1991 with a degree in philosophy and fell into a series of demoralizing low-level jobs, most making use of her Spanish-language skills. As a translator at a Colorado hospital, she says, “I was supposed to tell one poor woman after another, sitting there with kids, that she owed $6,000 when she had no money at all. I would look at her and tell her in Spanish, ‘You don’t owe anything, go home,’ and I would tell them in English that she said she would pay right away. Everyone would smile and shake hands, and then I would write off their debts when no one was watching.”
Though “Juan” is based on an actual exchange with her mother, Unferth doesn’t think her story is about the event itself. Rather, she says, “My writing is about writing. Writing that’s about writing is really about human consciousness.
