At 82, Isabel Allende is one of the world’s most beloved and best-selling Spanish-language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. That’s a lot of books.
Allende’s newest novel, “My Name Is Emilia del Valle,” will be published May 6, and it’s about a dark period in Chilean history: the 1891 Chilean civil war. Like so much of Allende’s work, it’s a story about women in tough spots who figure out a way through. Thematically, it’s not that far off from Allende’s own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31, raising two small children and working as a journalist, her life was upended forever. That year a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her father’s cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits,” which evolved from a letter she had begun writing to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway best seller and it remains one of her best-known.
Allende moved to the United States in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. But as she told me, she has never stopped longing for and thinking about her past — whether that’s her home country, her ancestors or her daughter who died young. After speaking to her, I think I understand why.
The main character in your new book, Emilia, doesn’t have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you didn’t have a relationship with your birth father. I’m curious about how your mother talked about your father when you were young and how you thought about him. She never spoke about him. All the photographs in which he appeared were destroyed, and there was never a mention of his name. When we asked, she would always say, “He was a very intelligent man.” That’s it. She wouldn’t say why he left, why we couldn’t see him, no explanation. At some point, when they were teenagers, my brothers wanted to meet him, and it was a big disappointment for them because my father had absolutely no connection with them and no interest in them, but I never looked for him. Many years later, when I was working as a journalist, I was called to the morgue to identify the body of a man that had died in the street. And I couldn’t identify him because I had never seen a picture of him. That was my father.
First of all, that sounds terrible. No, it wasn’t terrible. I mean, it was terrible to see a corpse for the first time, but I didn’t feel anything, any connection, any compassion, any longing of any kind.
Emilia also doesn’t have a connection to her father for much of her life. However, the scenes in the book when she does finally meet her father I found quite moving. What was it like to write those scenes? I could put myself in her place. I suppose that if I had met my father and he was an old man, sick, anxious, depressed, sad, fearing death, I would feel compassion, and I would feel close to him. I never had that chance, so I don’t know. But it was easy for me to imagine that she would behave like that, because she was very open-minded. She was open to everything.
Not surprisingly, given who you are, Emilia bucks a lot of convention for women of her time. She writes gory dime novels about murder and vengeance. She goes on to become a war reporter. At one point she meets a belly dancer in New York who convinces her that maybe it’s better to be a bad woman than it is to be a respectable young woman. You’ve said many times that you’ve been a feminist since you were a child because of the way that you saw your mother and women of your mother’s generation treated when you were growing up in Chile. Over the course of your career, has it been purposeful to write your female characters in this way, or is it just, like, “This is the only way I know how to write women”? It would be very hard for me to write a novel about a submissive wife in the suburbs that waits for her husband to come back from the job. There’s no story there. I write about women who are always challenging convention and get a lot of aggression for that, but they stand up, and they are able to fend for themselves. Those are the characters I love, and I write about them because I know them so well. I was born in a Catholic, conservative, authoritarian, patriarchal family in the ’40s. Women of my generation and my social class were supposed to marry and have kids, and that’s it. So to get out of that prison of the mind was very challenging. I belong to the first generation of women who were able, some of us, to do it.
How old do you think you were when you realized it was a prison of sorts? My mother says that when I was 5 or 6, they would ask, “What would you like to do when you grow up?” And I would say, “support myself.” But then later, I targeted male authority. I realized that authority was always in the hands of men. The priests, the police, my grandfather — it was always male. And then I rebelled against that, but it didn’t have a name. I didn’t know that there was something called feminism. I had never heard the word. And when I was in my late teens, then I heard about feminism and about the women’s movement, and I started reading things that gave me a more articulate language to express the anger that I had been feeling all my life.
Did you have other female friends whom you could talk to about this? Not about this, no. Girls were into trying to catch a husband, I suppose. I don’t know. I found a community of women who thought alike when I started working as a journalist in a women’s magazine called Paula. This was the first time in Chile there was a magazine that dared publish topics that had never been touched before. We talked about abortion, divorce, infidelity, all those things plus politics. We got involved in what was going on in the streets. But we also had fashion and beauty and decoration. It was a glossy women’s magazine, but with all this information that women had not had before. It caused quite a stir.
So, early in your career, you were a journalist. You worked for Paula, as well as several other places. And the story goes that you met one of the most famous Chilean writers of all time, the great Chilean poet — Pablo Neruda.
And he said, “Isabel, maybe this isn’t for you.” He was living at the beach in Isla Negra. He was sick and had already won the Nobel Prize. He invited me to his house, and I thought he wanted me to interview him. Everybody was so jealous in the magazine, because he had chosen me. It was winter, and I drove in the rain all the way to that place. He received me very kindly. He had lunch for me, a bottle of white wine. He showed me his collections — his collections now are considered art; then it was junk — and I said, “OK, Don Pablo, I really need to do the interview, because it’s going to get dark soon and I need to get back.” “What interview?” he said. “Well, I came to interview you.” “Oh, no, my dear, I would never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country. You put yourself always in the middle of everything. You lie all the time. And I’m sure that if you don’t have a story, you make it up. Why don’t you switch to literature, where all these defects are virtues?” I should have paid attention, but I didn’t until many years later.
Let’s just take a step back. You’re in the home of this literary genius and he tells you something that to most people would be crushing. I was crushed, too, of course! But he said it very kindly.
You didn’t listen to him at the time. No, I didn’t, and then two months later we had the military coup. So forget about any plans for the future. Everything was disrupted forever. And it was one of those crossroads where you have to take a new direction that was completely not planned and not expected. And my career as a journalist ended there.
You had to go to Venezuela, because there was a military coup. What was the moment you knew, “It’s time for me to go”? It took months and months. The brutality started in 24 hours — the Congress was dismissed indefinitely, there was censorship for everything, all civil rights were suspended, there was no habeas corpus, which means that a person can be arrested and they don’t have to give you any explanation and there is no hearing, there is no court, there’s no accusation of any kind, you just go to jail or disappear. Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and affected immediately, but most of the population wasn’t. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally.
For me, it was several things. At the beginning, I was hiding people in my house, because we didn’t know the consequences. We had no idea that if that person was arrested and forced to say where they had been, I would be arrested. Maybe my children would be tortured in front of me. But you learn that later. By the time I was directly threatened, I said, OK, I’m leaving. And my idea was that I was going to leave for a couple of months and then come back. So I went alone to Venezuela. And then a month later, my husband realized that I shouldn’t go back. And so he left. He just closed the door, locked the entrance door of the house with everything it contained and left to reunite with me in Venezuela. We never saw that house again, and everything it contained was lost, which doesn’t matter at all, because I don’t remember what was in there. But I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane, because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed.
How did you explain it to your children? I didn’t, and that’s my crime. We tried to protect the children from fear. Fear is a very pervasive thing that changes a society, and changes the way people behave with each other, and changes you inside. Something breaks inside you. We didn’t want our children to know about torture, about people disappearing, but they were aware. Suddenly two guys would come into the classroom and take the teacher away. So the children would see it, but there was no explanation. And so when we left, the idea was, Oh, we are going to Venezuela to see Mommy. It took a while for them to understand that we were staying, that we were refugees, and that probably we would not go back, and they had to adapt. They had to get along with everybody else and just forget about what was behind.
In Venezuela, you wrote your first novel, “The House of the Spirits,” at age 39. I think a lot of people have a feeling that at a certain point, maybe it’s too late for doing the thing that they want to do, that they were meant to do. When you got to that point where you started to write a letter to your grandfather that then turned into this incredible novel, did you think: What am I doing here? I’m 39 years old. I’m not going to become a novelist at this age. I didn’t think about age. I was feeling that my life was going nowhere, that I had lived for almost 40 years, and I had nothing to show for it except my two children. I was very bored administering a school in a country that was not my own, feeling very alien in many ways, like a visitor. A visitor in life, in a way. And so this letter that eventually turned into the book was like opening a vein and bleeding out all that I was holding. It was an exercise in longing. I wanted to go back, I wanted to recover the country I had lost, my friends, my job, the life I had before. And in that attempt of recovering things that I had lost, I started bringing in the anecdotes of my grandfather, my country, these people — it was a whole village that came to the kitchen counter where I was writing and populated the pages. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have an outline of any kind. I didn’t know how to edit anything, to the point that when the book was finished and my husband, who was a civil engineer, read it, he said the only thing that he noticed was that the dates didn’t match. You had a character on Page 20 that was 18 years old and on Page 300 was still 18 years old. What happened? This person didn’t age? So he created a map on the wall with the dates and the characters and what was happening, and then I could organize it a little bit.
You say you had a feeling that your life was going nowhere. I think if I felt that way, I would be overwhelmed. I don’t know that I would be able to start anything. I was lost, I was bored, I think I was depressed. But one thing has always been in my life: writing. Writing as a journalist, writing letters to my mother, writing to my grandfather, always writing. I think that my way of getting over things, of understanding, of exploring my own soul, my past, and also, most important, of remembering is writing. When my daughter died, that was the worst time in my whole life. The only way that I could understand it and cope with it was writing, and I wrote a book.
It’s been a little more than 30 years since you published that memoir that you just referred to, “Paula,” which is named after your daughter. It’s about your life with her and the situation you found yourself in, where she was in a coma for quite a long time and then she eventually passed. How has your grief changed or evolved in the 30 years since? I feel my daughter like a companion. I have her photograph on her wedding day and my mother in a wedding dress when she put it on when she was 80 — I have these two photographs on the sink where I brush my teeth every morning and every night. So I say, good morning, good evening. They’re always with me. And I’m constantly in touch with Paula. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t see her as an apparition. And I don’t believe that after I die, I will go through a tunnel of light and find her at the other end. But she lives in me.
Your first novel started as a letter; your memoir was a letter to your daughter. I’m wondering if you could talk about the exercise of writing letters. It’s just not something that people do anymore. Language has shrunk to nothing because of the email. We write like a telegram. We communicate with very few words and very poor imagery. But I grew up writing to my mother every single day, because my mother was married to a diplomat, and when I was 16, we separated and we never lived together again. So we got in the habit of writing to each other every single day. I would go through the day noticing what I would write to my mother in the evening. So I was present in the day, taking mental notes of what I was living, I was seeing, I was thinking, I was dreaming, of the conversations, the encounters, so that I would have some material for the evening letter to my mother. She died in 2018. I tried for a while to keep on writing to her as if she was alive, but it didn’t work. It was very artificial. Since then I go through life in a state of daydreaming. I don’t notice anything anymore, because I don’t have to write about it. It’s sad. I have collected my mother’s letters and my letters since 1987. They are separated into boxes by year. Some of the boxes have 600, 800 letters. So in total, we have calculated that I have around 24,000 letters. Can you imagine the volume of that?
That’s so many words to have exchanged with another person. What did you learn about her? It’s very interesting, because we were very intimate and open in the letters. And when I went to visit, in a week we would feel uncomfortable with each other. Things got in the way when we were together that didn’t when we were writing. So I got to know my mother in ways that I don’t know anybody else, not even my children. Everything about her — her health, her dreams, her longings, her disappointments, her fights with my stepfather, the reconciliations, everything. We talked about money, sex, religion, you name it. She had a sort of Chilean sarcasm that I loved, and we connected through that too. But that works in a letter, and then in person can be offensive.
Do you feel like there’s something inherent in the intimacy of letter writing, the access you have to someone’s inner feelings that just cannot be replicated when you’re with that person? Maybe some people can. I cannot. I married Roger. We’ve been together for six years.
This is your third husband? Not the last one, but the third. [Laughs] When we are separated physically, he writes to me the most tender and beautiful texts, and I can do that, too. But when we’re in person, I just can’t say it. It feels awkward.
Is it true that Roger reached out to you after hearing you on the radio by writing you a letter? An email. He heard me on NPR.
I was seeing him sitting down, taking out a piece of paper, writing out a letter. He sent an email to my foundation, and at the end it said that he was willing to go anywhere, anytime to meet me. I answered politely because I receive many emails daily, and I don’t keep a correspondence with everybody. I just answer the first one. But he kept writing every morning and every evening for six months. Really stubborn. And he didn’t sound like the normal stalker. He sounded like a very transparent guy. So when I went to New York, I met him, and in two days he proposed and said that he would marry me eventually, no matter what. But he was living in New York and I was living in California, so he sold his house, gave away everything he had, and moved here with two bikes, his clothes, and some crystal glasses for some reason. I don’t know why.
That’s quite powerful. You persuaded a man to get rid of his entire life and move across the country! I didn’t ask him to do it. He did it. But you know what is interesting, Gilberto, is that a couple of years before, I divorced my second husband, and I sold my house and gave away everything also, because I moved to a very small house with my dog, and I didn’t need anything. So we both, in a way, started from scratch together, which was a very good thing to do. No baggage. At least no material baggage.
I read an interview with you where you said that when you got a divorce in your early 70s, some people around you thought maybe this is a little crazy. How did that feel to you at that stage in your life? I was 74 years old. We had been together for 28 years. I had loved that man a lot. But you never know why love ends at some point. And it isn’t sudden. It was a slow deterioration that took years, and a lot of therapy to try to fix it until we realized we couldn’t, and so we divorced. And many people say: “Well, you’ve invested all these years. What is so bad that you can’t be together?” Nothing was really very bad, but I thought that it takes more courage to stay in a bad relationship than to start anew alone. You really have to be very courageous to decide that you’re going to spend the rest of the few years you have with a man that doesn’t love you and in a relationship that is not working. It’s much better to just be alone, so that’s what I did.
You’ve said that you write as an act of remembering. What do you want to remember now? Right now, I’m trying to be very present in the process of aging, because I think it’s a fascinating topic, and it’s sort of taboo in this society where we live. People don’t want to hear about aging. It’s ugly. And it can be, of course, but it can also be very liberating and a very wonderful journey. So I am trying to keep a record of this right now. But I’m very interested in what’s happening in the world also. I think that political events like what we are living today in the United States cannot be analyzed or explained or understood in the moment. You have to look at it with the distance of time. And I know this because I remember that I could not write about the military coup in Chile when it happened. I had all the information, but I couldn’t write about it. I wrote “The House of the Spirits” many years later. I hope to have enough time to be able to see what we are living today with some perspective.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Director of photography (video): Aaron Katter
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