My imagination has no answer to this question for my own case. However I did greatly enjoy the life story of a woman born in the French alps in the early nineteen twenties, before electricity came to her village. She was smart and hardworking, as must be the case for anyone living off the land. The first from her village to qualify for college, she went away to the city, got her degree, and came back to teach in one-room village schools, living for a while on close to nothing but her wits and dinners with the families of her pupils.
She married a vagabond artist, whom she succeeded in keeping out of the war with Germany, in which her brother had given his life. After the war they moved back into the home she grew up in, which they turned into a hostelry for tourists visiting the mountains. She wrote her story when she was eighty years old, titled it Une Soupe aux Herbes Sauvages. Her name was Marie Carles. She's gone now, but her book is still in print, and was a best seller throughout the country.