Chilean author Isabel Allende's next book, a memoir, will be published in 2008. (HarperCollins Canada)
Chilean author Isabel Allende has famously said that her life has been defined by two powerful forces: love and violence. When she was a child, her diplomat father abandoned her family; Isabel grew up in her grandfather’s home in Chile and later worked as a journalist. The country’s CIA-backed military coup in 1973 deposed and killed her uncle, democratically elected President Salvador Allende. A few years later, Isabel went into exile in Venezuela when her work on behalf of the people tortured and disappeared by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet endangered her own life.
It was in Venezuela in 1981 that Allende, then 40, wrote her debut novel, The House of the Spirits, a masterpiece of magic realism that began as a letter to her grandfather. The book became a global bestseller, was translated into more than 30 languages and adapted into a 1993 film starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. In honour of its success, she begins writing every new book on Jan. 8, the day she first sat down to write The House of the Spirits.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Spanish publication of The House of the Spirits. Her newest book, a memoir entitled The Sum of Our Days, is due out in 2008. In between, Allende has penned several other novels, essays and memoirs, as well as a series for young adults. At the request of the Chilean government, Allende recently travelled to Canada from her home in California to mark the 10th anniversary of a trade agreement between the two nations that emphasizes art, education and commerce.
As frank in person as she is in her writing, the petite author, dressed in a regal dark purple suit, recently sat down for an interview with CBCNews.ca. Perched on an overstuffed chair in a Toronto hotel room, her stiletto-clad feet hovered an inch above the ground. (She has a tart sense of humour about her size, once telling a reporter that the best joke she could think of was that she “was a young, tall blonde with long legs and big boobs.”) Allende spoke about her mother’s literary criticism, her hard-won love for America and why it’s good to be a liar.
Q: The importance of family is such a strong theme in your books. I understand that your mother is the first person to read your books and she’s actually your first editor. Is that still the case?
A: I write or speak to her every day. She’s 87 years old and she’s a smart cookie. She’s no longer my editor, because now she gets tired. But she still reads everything I write first, and doesn’t like any of it until she reads the reviews, which tend to change her mind.
Q: What is she critical of?
A: Usually the language. She says I’m not careful enough. She always wants me to go deeper into the characters, or she doesn’t like the ending. It’s good to have a person like her, who I trust blindly and who will tell me the truth.
Q: So are you aware of her in your head while you’re writing?
A: Only when I write the sex scenes. [Laughs]
Q: I take it she doesn’t approve?
A: She doesn’t mention them. The sensuality she doesn’t mind. It’s sex that bothers her. And anything that is too harsh against the Catholic Church. She doesn’t mind me being an agnostic. She just doesn’t want me to be too explicit about it.
Q: Was it difficult for you to shed the respectability and conservatism of your family?
A: Chileans are very somber, very repressed. But it’s very hypocritical. There’s a very strong, organized movement of women, yet divorce was only legalized a few years ago. In Chile, everybody is screwing everybody but it’s all under the table — not literally, but you know what I mean. I was very lucky, because I lived for a few years in Venezuela. Venezuela is a very hedonistic, eroticized culture. At the time, it was such a rich country because of the oil boom. Everything was easy. Everyone was partying. In Chile, if you have breasts, you wear a starched shirt to hide them. In Venezuela, you present them like melons on a platter. The philosophy is: If you have it, show it. That was really liberating.
Q: In your memoir, My Invented Country, you wrote about the echoes between the U.S.-backed Chilean coup of Sept. 11, 1973, and the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001. You said that the second Sept. 11 made you an American. It was after that that you became a citizen. Why was that?(HarperCollins Canada)
A: When I moved to the United States in 1987, I thought I could never belong there. These people seemed so childish. My [American] husband seemed so childish. I thought, What’s wrong with Americans that they take everything for granted? They complain all the time. What is this country that in its constitution it says you have the right to seek happiness? [Where I come from], if you survive, you are lucky. Seek happiness? Give me a break!
Then, when Sept. 11 happened, for the first time I saw the country shaken. They were afraid and they had the feeling that the rest of the world has always had: That life is very fragile and vulnerable. That feeling of vulnerability and community made me feel for the first time that I belonged in America.
What’s happened since is that the Bush administration has transformed all that into rampant fear, so much so that people were willing to sacrifice even their constitution for an illusionary safety. I’m embarrassed and angry [about this], but I’m still an American. This is a great country, but a young country. Things can change. I still feel very optimistic.Q: Do you feel optimistic about Chile, as well?
A: Chile is a country that is doing excellently, compared to other countries in Latin America and other countries in the world. It has a sound economy. It has a wonderful president, Michelle Bachelet, who is agnostic, a single mother, a pediatrician, a socialist. For a country that is so socially conservative, I’m amazed that she was elected.
Q: In both your fiction and non-fiction, you’ve written extensively about your family. Has there been any personal cost for that candour?
A: When I wrote The House of the Spirits, which is modelled on my family, but it’s fiction, many people didn’t speak to me for years. When I wrote Paula [Allende’s 1995 book about the death of her daughter], people criticized me for making money out of a tragedy. In fact, all the profits I used to create a foundation.
With [The Sum of Our Days], which is the story of my life since Paula’s death, the trouble is that the people are all living and they’re all around me. It’s about my family and friends. So it’s their life, too. I had to ask permission of everyone I mentioned. And you know, I soon realized that it’s always better to apologize afterwards than to ask for permission. [Laughs.]
Q: What drives you to write about your own life?
A: Well, Paula was catharsis. I wrote the book to survive. But with this new one, well, first of all, I’m an exhibitionist. And what’s that proverb about the scorpion? That it’s in its nature to sting. Writers write. I need to write things down in order to understand them. Life is very busy. It’s very noisy. When I sit down in silence and solitude to write, I can organize my thoughts, things become clearer. When I wrote this memoir, I gave it to everyone [who was] in it and then everyone gave back to me. They had other versions. They had explanations. They had ways of seeing events that I had never thought of. I realized that I had surfed over life and I hadn’t gone deep into anything. And by confronting each one of those versions and by talking to each of these people, I felt like I knew them better. It was so useful to me.
Q: You’ve said that you’re a born liar. That must be helpful as a novelist, but it must cause trouble in real life.
A: Of course. According to my husband, I have 50 versions of how we met and they are all true. And emotionally, they are all true. Why does a novel work? Because even if it is a collection of lies — of fictions — it contains an undeniable truth.
Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
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