I think The House of the Spirits was like a crazy attempt to recover everything I had lost-my country, my family, my past, my friends-and put everything together in these pages. “I wanted to tell him that I remembered everything he ever told me, and he could go in peace because it would not be lost.
“I started a letter for my grandfather almost knowing that he would never be able to read it, a spiritual letter-it was a letter to myself, really,” Allende told David Frost in a 2013 televised interview. In 1993, it was made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas.
Initially rejected by several Spanish-language publishers, the magically realistic book first came out in Spain and fast became an international bestseller. That letter was the basis for Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits, published in 1982. Allende showed the letter to her mother, and though the matriarch was appalled that her daughter would reveal the family’s secrets, even as fiction, she encouraged her to publish a book. As her grandfather neared death, she began writing a long letter to him, and kept writing after he died. In her immediate future was fantastic success. Yet Allende’s most difficult days were years ahead. The dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power, and, in 1975, after several people she knew disappeared, Isabel fled Chile with her husband and two young children and settled in Venezuela (most of the rest of her family also left the country her mother, who is still alive, has since returned to Chile). 11, 1973, during a brutal right-wing coup, he shot himself, choosing to die rather than be captured. Her father’s cousin, Salvador Allende, had been elected president of Chile in 1970, but on Sept. As a young child she returned to Chile, grew up in her grandfather’s spectral home, became a journalist, married young and had two kids. Born into a family of Chilean diplomats, she spent her first years in Peru. The arc of Allende’s life could be the story of one of her novels. And just about everyone who asked her a question that day at Book Passage, a bookstore in Corte Madera, addressed her simply as “Isabel,” as if they were talking to an old friend. Hanging on the beloved author’s every word, the audience in Marin County (just north of San Francisco) erupted in laughter. Without missing a beat the petite writer said: “First of all, I would have long legs, I would be beautiful, I would be stunning, and smart, very strong and independent.
Halfway through an hourlong talk to a group of aspiring writers last August, Chilean author Isabel Allende was asked, “If you were a character in an Isabel Allende novel, where would you put yourself?”
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