During the s, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende was fired from a job translating romance novels into Spanish after it was discovered that she was altering the dialogue of the female characters to make them sound more intelligent. Allende quickly turned to creating intelligent female characters of her own and has gone on sell more than 56 million books, which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have won multiple awards in Chile and throughout the world.
Allende is most famous for her literary novels — such as The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna — which often incorporate elements of magic realism and autobiography. Show up. Show up in front of the computer or the typewriter. In the short story you have all the control. However, there are very few good short stories. And there are many memorable novels. In a novel you can make mistakes and very few people will notice. Happy endings usually don't work for me. I like open endings.
Which writers have influenced you most? I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others.
I read that book again every decade or so. From these books I got a sense of plot and strong characters. At that time and in that place, girls didn't have much social life aside from school and family; we didn't even go to the movies. My only escape from a troublesome family life was reading. I used a flashlight, could not mark the pages, and read quickly, skipping pages and looking for the dirty parts.
My hormones were raging and my imagination went wild with those fantastic tales. When critics call me a Latin America Sheherazade I feel very flattered! The American and European feminists that I read in my twenties gave me an articulate language to express the anger I felt against the patriarchy in which we all live.
I started working at Paula , a Chilean feminist magazine, sharpening my ideas and my pen to defy the male establishment. It was the best time of my life. I have always liked movies, and sometimes an image or a scene or a character stays with me for years and inspires me when I write.
For example: the magic in Fanny and Alexander or the story within a story of Shakespeare in Love. What happens when you start a novel? When I start I am in a total limbo. I don't have any idea where the story is going or what is going to happen or why I am writing it.
I only know that—in a way that I can't even understand at the time—I am connected to the story. I have chosen that story because it was important to me in the past or it will be in the future.
Do you do a lot of editing? Yes, for language and tension, but not for plot. The story or the characters have a life of their own.
I can't control them. I want the characters to be happy, to get married, and to have a lot of children and live happily ever after, but it never happens that way. As I said before, happy endings don't work for me. Can you talk about the healing elements of writing and, specifically, about writing Paula? I would think that writing Paula was very difficult and very painful. When I was writing Paula , my assistant would come to the office and find me crying. Writing is my way of mourning.
After it was finished, I felt that my daughter was alive in my heart, her memory preserved. As long as it is written, it will be remembered. I can't remember details, names, and places, and that is why every day I write a letter to my mother. When I wrote about Paula and our life together, I recorded it forever. I will never forget. That is the life of the spirit. When I read Paula, I was struck by how self-revelatory it was. People don't normally speak about that kind of pain. Your experience of death, sickness, and tragedy was a gift to many people.
I feel connected to those readers who have written to me. Pain is universal. We all experience pain, loss, and death the same way. I get letters from doctors who feel that they will never be able to see their patients in the way they did before reading the book, and from young people who identify with Paula and think for the first time about their own mortality. Many of the letters are from very young women who never have had a real loss but who feel they don't have a sense of family or support in their communities.
They feel very lonely. They want a connection with a man the way Paula was connected to her husband. I receive letters from mothers who have lost children and think that they will die of sorrow. But one doesn't die. The death of a child is the oldest sorrow of women. Mothers have lost children for millennia. It is only a privileged few who can expect all of their children to live. Many reviewers regard Paula as your greatest book. Would you say that writing about Paula affected you more deeply than all the other books?
Yes, all the rest was rehearsal. And when I finished Paula I found it very difficult to write again. What could I possibly write about that would be as significant to me? Do you think that a writer chooses what to write or that the writing chooses you? I think that the stories choose me. So you are a storyteller first and a writer second? The storytelling is the fun part. The writing can be a lot of work! Does your background as a journalist help you?
I work with emotions; language is the tool, the instrument. The story is always about some very deep emotion that is important for me. When I write, I try to use language in an efficient way, the way a journalist does.
You have very little space and time and have to grab your reader by the neck and not let go. From journalism I have also learned other practical things, like how to research a topic, how to conduct an interview, and how to observe and to talk to people on the street. When you talk about opening yourself up to the experience, are you opening yourself up to a magical world?
Do spirits actually come in and suggest words, images, and scenes for you? In a certain way. There is also an intellectual process, of course. But there is something magic in the storytelling. You tap into another world. I have a feeling that I don't invent anything.
That, somehow, I discover things that are from another dimension. That they are already there, and my job is to find them and bring them onto the page. But I don't make them up. Over the years things have happened in my life and in my writing that have proved to me that anything is possible. I am open to all the mysteries.
When you spend too many hours—as many, many hours a day as I do—alone and in silence, you are able to see that world. I imagine that people who pray or mediate for long hours, or who spend time alone in a convent or another quiet place, end up hearing voices and seeing visions because solitude and silence create the basis for that awareness.
After decades of controversy surrounding the cause of his death, an autopsy confirmed in that it was a suicide. Isabel Allende became active in aiding victims of the repression and brutality of Pinochet's regime, but realizing it was dangerous to stay in Chile, she fled the country with her husband and two children in and lived in exile in Venezuela for 13 years. In , Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, who was dying in Chile. The letter became the basis for her first novel, The House of the Spirits , which became a worldwide bestseller and launched her literary career.
The novel tells the story of two families living in Chile from the s until the military coup, weaving together elements of magical realism and political testimony.
At the urging of her three grandchildren, Allende wrote her first book for young adults, City of the Beasts , which was published in It was the first book in a trilogy for young readers, which also included Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies The author calls her writing style "realistic literature, rooted in her remarkable upbringing and the mystical people and events that fueled her imagination," according to her website , She also explains that her work is "equally informed by her feminist convictions, her commitment to social justice, and the harsh political realities that shaped her destiny.
In addition to fiction, Allende has mined her own life to write deeply personal memoirs, including Paula about the life and loss of her daughter to a rare disease; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses , her ode to food and sex; My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile about her early life and the inspirations of her personal history; and The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir about her life following the death of her daughter.
And in that long, very patient daily exercise of writing I have discovered a lot about myself and about life. I have learned. I take notes all the time. I have a notebook in my purse and when I see or hear something interesting, I make a note. I cut clippings from newspapers and write notes about the news I hear on TV.
I write notes on stories that people tell me. When I start a book I pull out all these notes because they inspire me. I write directly on my computer using no outline, just following my instinct. Once the story has been told on the screen, I print it for the first time and read it. Then I know what the book is about.
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