Isabel Allende’s mother was born during the Spanish flu and died just before the outbreak of Covid. After she died, her daughter attempted to write a book about her. “I really tried, but it didn’t work out,” she tells me. “Although my mother was a very special woman, she did not have an extraordinary life.” So instead she wrote her latest novel Violeta, an epic account of a woman who lives during the same period as her mother but, unlike her, manages to achieve financial independence. “Violeta could be my mother, if my mother would have been able to support herself.”
Allende, 79, was born in Peru and grew up in Chile (her father’s cousin was Chilean president Salvador Allende, overthrown in a coup in 1973), and now lives with her husband in California. She has written 26 books, which she always starts on 8th January—initially due to superstition after the success of her first book, The House of the Spirits, which she began on 8th January 1981, and later because it gave a structure to her busy life. “I try to keep [my writing each day] to six hours, more or less,” she says. “Because I have a life. I have a new husband and I want to enjoy life before I die.”
Allende writes non-fiction in both English and Spanish, but always uses Spanish for her fiction. “I can only [write fiction] in my language, because it’s very similar to the process of dreaming,” she explains. “Imagination and memory are very close.”
She hasn’t lived in Chile for 40 years—although she visited the country often before Covid—but she frequently makes it the setting for her novels. “I lived there for a few years but those years mark my life.”
Many of Allende’s characters experience great suffering. “Stories of immigrants, women, survivors of violence and war, marginalised people, those are the stories that I usually write about,” she says. Through the Isabel Allende Foundation, which she created after her daughter’s death in 1992, Allende meets “extraordinary women who have gone through hell,” who inspire her novels. “I always [write] strong women, not because I’m making them up, but because they are part of my reality.
“It would be very difficult for me to write a book about some psychological problem between a couple in an apartment in New York, because I really don’t care much about it,” she adds. “I care about a woman in a refugee camp, not about someone who’s having depression—not that I don’t feel sympathy for that.”
Threats to abortion rights in the US and Latin America have not diminished her hope for gender equality. “There’s a backlash here [in the US] and there [in South America],” she says. “But it will pick up again, because the feminist movement—like most movements—moves forward. And in this case, it’s very difficult to stop it.
“I witnessed the very beginning, the big wave of feminism of the sixties and seventies. And I have seen backlash. Sometimes the movement seems to stall. But then it picks up with a new generation again.”
When 35-year-old socialist Gabriel Boric defeated his far-right rival in the Chilean presidential election in December, she was delighted. “All these things that I have been advocating for years, suddenly, this young generation—nobody is over 40, they could be my grandchildren—they’re doing it. They’re worried about climate change, they want to include all the native peoples, gender parity, women and men on equal terms, sharing power.
“All that is extraordinary. And if they are able to achieve it, it will be an example for many other countries to follow.”
