The beloved author left Chile at a time of great turmoil and has longed for the nation of her youth ever since. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who is Isabel Allende and what is her new book about?
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm guest hosting this week, filling in for Lulu. If you don't know me, I'm the editor of The New York Times Book Review and the host of The Book Review podcast. And I'm very happy to be getting the chance to talk with author Isabel Allende.
At 82, 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. Allende's newest book is called My Name is Emilia del Valle, 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. It's not that far off from Allende's own story. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31 and working as a journalist with two small children, her life was upended forever.
It was then that a military coup pushed out the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, who was her cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote her first book, The House of the Spirits, which evolved from a letter she had started to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway bestseller, and it remains one of her best-known works. She moved to the U.S.
in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. Here is my conversation with Isabel Allende.
Hola, Gilberto, ¿hablas español?
Un poquito.
Un poquito, con ese nombre tendrías que hablar español.
Please, it is my great shame.
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Chapter 2: How does Isabel Allende connect her personal history to her writing?
I obviously want to talk to you about your new book, about your personal history, and of course about writing and creativity. And I think for you, all of these things intertwine in many of your books, and they certainly do in your new novel. This is a book that is set in the 1890s. Your main character, heads down to witness the Chilean civil war that is happening there.
And I'm wondering what was going through your mind when you said, this is the time period, this is the event, and this is what I want my character to see.
I'm fascinated with history. Most of my schooling was done abroad, so I studied very little Chilean history, but I have studied it as an adult. I look back all the time to what happened before in order to explain what's happening today in our lives.
Mm-hmm.
Chapter 3: What historical parallels does Allende see between Chile’s past and present?
There are some parallels between what happened in 1891 when the president, José Manuel Balmaceda, was challenged by his economic and political enemies of the conservative party. The Navy went with the opposition, and then they had a civil war. It was brutal, brutal, bloody. And it has some parallels with what happened in 1973 in Chile with Salvador Allende. There was no civil war.
There was really a brutal military coup, as we know. But both presidents committed suicide. In both circumstances, many Chileans died. So there were some historical parallels. So it was fascinating to explore.
The main character, Emilia, she shares a last name with several other characters across your body of work, including several in your first book, The House of the Spirits. Why does this name resonate with you? What are you trying to say by sort of threading this name or this family line throughout several of your books?
You know, some characters, like some people, never leave you. I wrote The House of the Spirits inspired by my relatives, from my grandmother's side mostly. And they were all lunatics and wonderful, extravagant people. I call them Del Valle, but really their last name is Barros.
And so I picked up those characters, some of them, and there were many others there that I didn't have enough pages for them. So they came back in other books. Look, with relatives like mine, you don't need to invent anything. So the Del Valle family will be haunting me forever.
Well, speaking of relatives, Emilia, she doesn't have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you did not have a relationship with your birth father. I'm curious about how your mother, Panchita, talked about your father when you were young and how you thought about him, if at all.
She never spoke about him. All the photographs in which he appeared were destroyed. And there was never a mention of his name. And 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 them. And many years later, when I was working as a journalist, I was called to the morgue to identify a 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.
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Chapter 4: Why does Isabel Allende use the Del Valle family name throughout her books?
First of all, that sounds terrible.
No, it wasn't terrible because, 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 Emilia does finally meet her father, not to give away too many details, I found quite moving. And I was wondering what it was like to write those scenes for you.
I could put myself in her place. I suppose that if I have 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, but 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 also she was very open-minded, Emilia. She was open to everything.
Emilia, not surprisingly, given who you are, she bucks a lot of convention for women of her time period. She goes on to become a war reporter. She writes gory dime novels about murder and vengeance. You have written and you've said many times that you've been a feminist since you were a child because of the way that you saw women.
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Chapter 5: How did Isabel Allende’s relationship with her birth father influence her storytelling?
your mother and women of your mother's generation treated when you were growing up in Chile. And I wonder, over the course of your career, has it been purposeful to write your female characters in this way? Or it's just like, this is the only way I know how to write women.
You know, 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. I mean, there's no story there. Look, you cannot have characters with common sense. You cannot have characters who are like everybody else, who don't suffer. The story is in the tragedy, in the drama, in the struggle, in the hero's journey.
That's where the story is. 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.
And in many ways, I can connect to that because I was born in a Catholic, conservative, authoritarian, patriarchal family in the 40s, in the middle of the Second World War. 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, really, 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?
teenager. When I was little, I didn't want to be dependent. My mother says that when I was five or six, they would ask, what would you like to do when you grow up? And I would say, support myself. That was my answer. Support myself. Because I realized that because my mother could not support herself, she depended on her father, her brother, other people. And that made her very vulnerable.
I didn't want that. But then later, I sort of 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 a few things that gave me a more articulate language to express the anger that I had been feeling all my life.
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Chapter 6: Why does Isabel Allende focus on strong, unconventional female characters?
Yeah. To find a place and this young, all these women were young. They were all beautiful. They were so daring. It was just great.
So early in your career, you were a journalist. You worked for this magazine, 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 is it for you.
Well, he was living in the beach in Isla Negra. He was sick. And he already had won the Nobel Prize. And he invited me to his house. And I thought he wanted me to interview him. This was such a huge honor. I mean, everybody was so jealous in the magazine because he had chosen me to go and interview him. It was winter. And I drove raining all the way to that place.
And he received me very kindly and warmly. 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 then I said, OK, Don Paolo, 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, 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.
Of course I was crushed, but he said it very kindly. And I asked him then why he had invited me if he didn't want me to interview. He said because he liked what I wrote. And sometimes he would make copies of my humorous articles and send them to his friends. And that's why he wanted to meet me.
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Chapter 7: What was Isabel Allende’s experience working as a journalist in Chile?
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. And then by the time I was directly threatened, then I said, okay, 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, definitely 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. We were living in fear. And 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. And we didn't want our children to know about torture, about people disappearing. But they were aware.
Suddenly, the teacher, 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. That's what my husband said. We are going to Venezuela to see mommy.
So 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.
After the break, Isabel tells me about the years she spent writing daily letters to her mother.
We were very intimate and open, absolutely open in the letters. And when I went to visit, in a week we would feel like uncomfortable with each other because in person we didn't have the same openness that we had in writing.
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Chapter 8: How did the 1973 military coup in Chile change Isabel Allende’s life?
I feel my daughter like a companion. I have children. 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 are 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 I will find her at the other end. But she lives in me. And there's a continuation. The grandmother, the mother, the daughter, the granddaughter. We're all linked in a chain. And we all live in each other in a way.
I get the impression, I think you've said this maybe before, that it's a book that still resonates greatly with people after all this time.
I have written 30 books, and this is the one that has had, in time, the greatest response from the readers. Everybody has losses. It doesn't have to be a child. It can be divorce. You lose your job. You lose your health. your parents, and people connect to the loss, no matter what loss it is. In this case, it's Paula. I get the most extraordinary letters.
That's the kind of reward that very few writers get. I've been very, very lucky.
Speaking of letters, your first novel, of course, started as a letter. Your memoir was a letter to your daughter. And I'm wondering if we could talk about the exercise of writing letters for you. It's just not something that people do anymore. Sure.
Unfortunately, it's a lost art. Language has shrunk to nothing because of the email. And 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 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 of everything, so that I would have some material for the evening letter to my mother. Now, she died in 2018.
And 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. But since then, I go through life like 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 in boxes by year.
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