A woman of many stories
Isabel Allende adds up the meaning of family in ‘The Sum of Our Days’
By Atina Hartunian 03/27/2008
The phone rings early Thursday morning, and on the other end is author Isabel Allende, who sounds like she’s been up for hours. Wasting absolutely no time, she starts the conversation about her most recent book, “The Sum of Our Days.”
“It’s sort of a sequel to another book I wrote 13 years ago, ‘Paula,’” she says.
“Paula,” Allende explains, was first written as a letter to her daughter, Paula Frias, who had fallen into a coma and was expected to suffer memory loss when she woke up. “So I started writing a letter to her to remind her who she was and where she came from; it was the story of her family in Chile and her life.”
The course of Allende’s life changed when she learned that Paula had suffered severe brain damage and would not recover. Her daughter died on Dec. 6, 1992, and later Allende established a foundation in her memory to support organizations that help women and children.
The death of Allende’s daughter also changed the course of her writing. “The second part of ‘Paula’ is no longer a letter — it’s real life. And the book was about my crazy family,” she says.
“The Sum of Our Days” picks up a decade after “Paula” left off.
“There’s a lot that’s happened to my tribe,” says Allende. Her “tribe” centers around her children and grandchildren, in an extended network of friends and family and her American husband, Willie Gordon. Also in Allende’s world is a strong network of women, all in their 60s, who have been friends for 15 years and call themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder.
Allende, 65, was born in Peru to Chilean ambassador Tomás Allende, cousin of Salvador Allende, who served as president of Chile from 1970 until his death during the Sept. 11, 1973, coup d’état by dictator Augusto Pinochet.
She worked as a journalist in Chile and Venezuela while writing several plays, short stories and a number of acclaimed novels in the magical realist tradition. Her first novel, 1982’s “The House of the Spirits,” catapulted her to literary stardom, and has been followed by more than a dozen books.
Allende currently lives in the Bay Area and has taught at several American universities, including the University of California, Berkeley. She is discussing and signing “The Sum of Our Days” on April 3 at All Saints Church in Pasadena.
The memoir opens the doors to four households, each three minutes apart from the other. Everyone has keys to each other’s houses. Every closet is fair game to rummage through to borrow a dress or piece of jewelry. “If I make beans, it will be for four houses, and not just for Willie and me,” Allende explains. “That idea of the extended family of the village is what the book is about.” There are stories about Allende’s husband’s biological children who have struggled with substance abuse. “In one of them, the daughter died. And the other has spent more then 12 years in prison — just for petty stuff, for drugs, I mean nothing serious. The other one was lost for years and years. Now the two boys are doing so much better. It’s like a miracle.”
Allende also shares the story about how her daughter-in-law concluded she was lesbian — after marrying Allende’s son and having children with him. “When she left my son, she fell in love with my stepson’s girlfriend. The family was broken.”
In exploring various other pressures that threatened to break the bonds of family, friendship and even marriage, things do eventually get better for just about everybody, leaving the reader with a sense of optimism and hope.
When asked what she hopes others will take from her memoir, Allende says she had no particular message in mind. “But I am getting hundreds of letters from all over,” she says, “and it seems like there’s nostalgia for [a sense of having a nuclear] family, especially for people who live in big cities. … Lack of friends, lack of community is a terrible loss. When they read the book, they remember how their childhood was and the stories of their grandparents, and they reconnect.”
Isabel Allende discusses and signs “The Sum of Our Days,” at 7 p.m. on April 3 at All Saints Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena. Tickets will be required. For more information and tickets, call event co-sponsor Vroman’s Bookstore at (626) 449-5320. To learn more about Allende and her foundation, visit www.isabelallende.com.
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT