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| After 'Paula': Allende's new memoir begins after the death of her daughter, to whom she addressed an earlier work. Courtesy of William Gordon |
An author shares the real drama in her life
Isabel Allende tells her own story of politics, heartache, and the joy to be found in a large and loving family.
from the April 22, 2008 edition
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The most astonishing part of this story: It actually works. This is despite Allende's "pernicious mother-in-law" tendencies, which she laughingly talks about dialing back. (Her husband calls her "a hurricane in a bottle.")
She was in the habit of letting herself into her son's house to kiss her grandchildren good morning – to the consternation of her freshly showered daughter-in-law. And she once rearranged their living room while they were out, in order to showcase the new rug she had bought them.
Allende writes with striking candor and humor about everything from her rigorous writing schedule – she starts every book on Jan. 8, the day she began "The House of the Spirits" and writes 10-12 hours a day – to her plastic surgery.
When Allende comments that the family's many dramas must make them seem "decadent" to outsiders, her husband calmly remarks, "You can't know what happens in other families behind their closed doors. The difference with ours is that everything is out in broad daylight."
But a reader rarely feels squirmy about the family invasion. That may be because Allende's candor doesn't extend to stomping on others' right to privacy. For example, after reading a completed draft, one of her stepsons asked that his story be removed, so Allende rewrote the memoir. (Her mother has flatly forbidden Allende to use her life in a novel.)
Allende does have a regrettable tendency to write about her dreams (even while acknowledging how boring dreams are). And occasionally the profound becomes the profoundly trite, with sentences such as: "Birth and death, Paula, are so similar … sacred and mysterious."
The feel of a real family gathering
"The Sum of Our Days" seems to meander aimlessly, like a conversation between loved ones, but the strength of the characters Allende gathers around her, and the strength of her love for her homemade American family, make this clan gathering one that her fans will be reluctant to leave.
• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
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