Isabel Allende was born in August 1942 in Lima, Peru. She became a prominent journalist, working in television and for magazines in the 60s and 70s. When general Augusto Pinochet launched his military coup in 1973, Allende became active in aiding victims of the repression and brutality of the regime. Realising it was dangerous to stay in Chile, she fled the country with her husband and two children in 1975 to live in exile in Venezuela.
Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her dying grandfather. Since then, she has authored more than 28 bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts. Isabel Allende’s work has been translated into over 42 languages and she has been called the “world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”.
Speaking to the Big Issue for her Letter to My Younger Self, Isabel Allende reflected on how feminism changed her life, her early years of writing and her regrets.
When I was 18 I was working as a secretary, a very boring and awful job. I really wanted to be independent. I wanted to be an adult, just grow up and take care of myself. I had finished my high school education, which was very irregular, because my parents were diplomats. So we travelled a lot, and I was always changing schools. I could hardly write properly in Spanish, and I knew nothing about Chilean history.
1985: Isabel Allende at home in Caracas. Image: FELIPE AMILIBIA/AFP via Getty Images
I never had any relationship with my father. I met him only once. He died in the street of a heart attack, and they called me to identify his body, but I couldn’t because I had never seen a picture of him.
I had an excellent relationship with my mum and I had a wonderful stepfather who I did not appreciate until later. At the beginning, I was very jealous of him, because he took my mother’s attention, and so I didn’t like him. But then when my daughter was born, when I was 21, my stepfather fell in love with Paula, my daughter, and I saw him in a way I had never seen him before. I saw tenderness, humour, he was sentimental. He would do anything for my daughter, and she adored him. And that relationship lasted until he died. He died at 103 and he lost his memory in the last 10 years. The only person that he could remember and identify was Paula. You couldn’t talk about her in front of him without him starting to cry.
I think I was an angry teenage girl, always talking about feminism and socialism and justice. While other girls were trying on different bras and makeup, I was just angry at the world, angry at injustice, angry at the fact that I was a woman in a male chauvinist, patriarchal Catholic society.
My mum was smart and beautiful. She was an artist. She could paint beautifully, but she was dependent. She depended first on her first husband, her father, then the second husband, and eventually me. So I think that by watching my mum’s situation I had this ferocious desire to be independent. I was expected to get married and have kids, but I didn’t want that for myself. When I started reading feminist books like [Germaine Greer’s] The Female Eunuch, I knew I wasn’t a lunatic. There was a movement of women out there saying the same things.
I didn’t have an idea of a career. I did not go to university or to college. But I was good at writing. When I was in Geneva with my daughter, my mother showed one of my letters to a friend of hers who was starting a magazine in Chile. She liked it. So I became a journalist. It was the best job for me because I was young, full of energy. We were talking about feminism and other things that were never in the press; abortion and divorce and rape and all the stuff that was never, ever mentioned, not even in private. So the magazine was very progressive and very avant garde and irreverent, and I found my niche there. I learned a lot, and loved it. But when my mum got wind of what was going on she would caution me. She would say, be careful. You’re going to get aggression. During the military coup in Chile, in 1976, I had to leave the country [Isabel Allende was added to a ‘wanted’ list of targets identified by the Pinochet regime after she helped threatened people with safe passage out of Chile] and I’ve never gone back to live there.
1993: Isabel Allende (seated) with the cast of The House of the Spirits (l-r) Glenn Close, Mariam Colon, Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Vanessa Redgrave, Armin Mueller-Stahl and director Bille August. Image: Rolf Konow/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
I didn’t actively choose to move from journalism to fiction. It sort of just happened. In 1981 I was living in exile in Venezuela and working administering a school. It was a very unhappy life. My marriage was collapsing. My two children were teenagers, and they were already flying away from the nest and I felt that my life was going nowhere. It was flat and boring. Then I got a phone call to tell me my grandfather was dying in Chile and I couldn’t go back to say goodbye to him. And I adored that man. I’d been writing to him all the time, but this seemed to call for a different kind of letter, because it was like a spiritual goodbye. He died and never received the letter, because I kept on writing and writing it. By the end of the year, I had more than 500 pages, and that was my first novel, The House of the Spirits. It became an immediate success in Europe. I didn’t know about the success because it was far away from me in Venezuela. So I kept working at the school, and I started writing a second book, but without any expectations. Then I received the first cheque, and I thought, wow, this is fantastic. Once I started writing I couldn’t stop. I realised that was my calling.
The only time I ever had writers’ block was when my daughter died [Paula died aged 29, after an error in her medication resulted in severe brain damage]. I wrote a book called Paula, which is a memoir about Paula, her life, her country, the family. It wasn’t really a book about death, it was about her life. After that I tried to write every single day, and then I had to throw away everything I wrote because it was black and boring and grey. But that’s how I felt my life was. So it was a reflection of how I was inside. I went into a writer’s block that lasted almost three years. However I then remembered my training as a journalist; if I’m given a subject, I can write about almost anything if I have time to research. So I gave myself a subject that would be as removed as possible from death and grief and mourning. I wrote a book called Aphrodite, which is about lust and gluttony, sex and food. And that pulled me out of the writer’s block.
Like any person who has looked at their life, I have regrets. I have regrets about things that I didn’t do and things I did. When I was around 36-years-old, living in Venezuela, I fell in love with an Argentinian musician. I was married, and I left my family and followed him to Spain. I left my kids. Eventually, of course, I came back but I hurt them badly, and I hurt my husband, and I don’t think they forgave me for years and years. We never talked about it. They never wanted to talk about it. In the last couple of years, I talked to my son, who is, of course, now an old man, and I said, “Nico, I never apologised properly for what happened, and I am really sorry that I hurt you and your sister.” So we sort of cleared the air a bit. But he did remember, and he did remember the pain.
2014: Isabel Allende at the White House, receiving the Medal of Freedom from then-president Barack Obama. Image: Olivier Douliery/ABACAPRESS.COM
I’m not a very good grandparent. I used to be when the kids were little. I would see them every day and tell them stories and spoil them rotten or whatever. But then they went to college and the family was dispersed forever. Then you see them for Thanksgiving and maybe for Christmas, and that’s it. So there was a point when I let go of our closeness, because I thought I’m just suffering, just worrying, reaching out, trying to keep that relationship going, and they are not interested. They have their own lives. The moment I let go of them, it was like breathing. Now I still love them but with no attachment.
If I could have one last conversation with anyone it would be with my daughter Paula. She was adorable. She really died at 28 – she physically died at 29 but she’d been in a coma for a year. I miss her terribly, and I know my son does too, because they were great siblings. They adored each other. Paula was very smart and cerebral and hardworking, a great student. But she was emotionally very sentimental and very dependent. Emotionally, she wanted to be cuddled, she wanted to be taken care of. She had a husband who used to cuddle her but she was married for only six months before she went into a coma. I’d love to talk to her one more time.
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