Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende; born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spiritsand City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 August 1942
CityLima, Peru
CountryChile
My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.
I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.
Everything that has to do with food is sensuous. In the United States, however, we are eating all the time. We have a problem with obesity. And yet, we don't enjoy food that much.
I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.
I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.
I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.
I remember my childhood as a horrible time. My mother says that nothing so horrible ever happened to me as the things that I remember.
I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research.
Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.
You couldn't find two people more different than my mother and I. There are a thousand things about me that she fought against.
Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.
I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.