Writing for Your Life: Juan SanMiguel

Barbara Myerhoff was teaching a class at the University of Southern California:

'[T]he students were required to interview someone very different from themselves.... One young man in the class ... was having such great difficulty in finding a subject that he considered dropping the course. However, the day the paper was due, he arrived in the class ecstatic.'

"I was at my wit's end," he said, "when it occurred to me to interview our Guatemalan housekeeper. ... it was rather late at night. But as I had to do the paper, I went to her room and knocked at her door. When I entered, I [asked] if it would be a terrible nuisance for her to tell me something about her life. She looked at me strangely and my heart sank. After what seemed a very, very long time, she said quietly, 'Every night before I go to sleep, I rehearse the story of my life, just in case someone should ever ask me. Gracias a Dios.'"'