Isabel Allende was born in Chile in 1942 and exiled from her homeland after 1973’s bloody military coup and the ensuing dictatorship. Originally a journalist, she left her husband of 25 years and fell in love with an American, uprooting herself from Latin America to live with him in California. Later, she suffered the loss of her beloved daughter, Paula, who, after a year in coma, died at the tender age of 28.

All of this Allende told in her 1995 memoir, Paula. Her latest book,The Sum of Our Days, brings readers up to date on the author’s colourful life. Allende’s passionate love for her second husband, Willie, and the healing journey that they have undertaken together forms a major theme of her second book of autobiography.
“Willie’s life has been full of grief and loss,” says Allende. “He has three biological children, the three of them heroin addicts. His daughter Jennifer has been missing for years, we assume that she is dead.”
In the book, Allende tells how she and Willie’s pain about their children nearly caused them to split.
“Being Chilean, I had never been in therapy, so I didn’t know how much it could help,” she says. “I didn’t want to go but Willie dragged me. He said ‘no, we are not going to get a divorce, we are going to go to see a therapist’. And it really brought us together, because we could grieve together. And that was healing for both of us. My grief for Paula was totally overwhelming. It just devastated me. But Willie had already lost his daughter to drugs, so his grieving was quite different. I thought that he was cold, that he didn’t love his daughter, that he couldn’t understand my loss…
“Three addicted kids in a family. The daughter had a heroin baby before she disappeared. One of the sons was in prison for years. I had never encountered anything like that, so I didn’t know how to handle it. I blamed it on Willie, I said he was a very lenient father – but really, you cannot do that. Because nobody really knows why some people are addicted and some people are not – all kids try drugs, and some become addicted and some don’t.
“So we needed therapy, especially me, to handle a situation that was totally new to me. Willie is a very strong person; I can always bounce against him. I am like a truck: I can really flatten anyone that close to me, but he won’t allow that.”
How does Willie feel about the fact that you have exposed his dysfunctional family life in your book?
“He doesn’t mind at all,” says Allende. “He was the only person in the family when I announced that I was writing a memoir who didn’t say ‘don’t write this, don’t write that’. He’s totally open. He’s the one who taught me that it is not what you tell that makes you vulnerable, it’s the secrets you keep. On the other hand, all of the stuff that I write is well-known. Everyone knows the story of my ex-daughter-in-law coming out of the closet…”

SIGNIFICANT DREAMS
Isabel Allende’s son Nico and his wife Celia moved to California to be near Allende, and had three children in quick succession (Allende admits to being “completely obsessed” about her grandchildren). They lived together, apparently happily, until Celia fell in love with a woman, precipitating a massive but ultimately healing crisis in the whole family.
“I only wrote about the people who accepted being in the book,” says Allende. “They liked what I wrote and now that we’re getting such great feedback ­– we are getting hundreds of letters, because the book has already been published in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian – everybody’s very pleased.”
Allende’s books take it as given that a world of spirits exist beyond rational reality. She is essentially a witch who practices magic through ritual, prayer, meditation and fun, with a small group of female friends called “the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder”.
“In most of the world,” says Allende, “people are aware that the world is a very mysterious place. There’s a lot that we don’t know, much that we can’t control or explain. It’s only in the US and Europe and the west that people deny everything that they cannot control or own, or buy or explain.
“But all that is part of my world. I’m open. I have never seen Paula’s ghost, but she lives in my memory. She lives in the memory of this family, and in the work we do to honour her in the foundation that we set up, which is dedicated to helping disadvantaged women and children. Paula is alive for me. She appears all the time in coincidences.
“I’m open to the world of dreams. Dreams can be so revealing. It’s part of our unconscious, part of the information that we have stored somewhere – and we have no access to it except in dreams. If I have a significant dream, I write it in a notepad that I have on my bedside table, and the next day I tell it to my mother in my daily letter. If it’s very important I put it in my computer with the date, and usually the dream reveals something about my family, my life, my state of mind, and especially, my work.”

POWERFUL POTION
Her work as a writer facilitates Allende in the search for a deeper, other-worldly kind of truth.
“I think because I spend a lot of time alone and in silence, I see connections,” she says. “I’m more aware of the signs, more aware of the coincidences. Most people live in a hurry and in the noise of the world, so there’s no possibility of getting in touch with anything like that. If you’re running around, how can you? It has to come from observation from a quiet place inside you.
“When Paula was in a coma for a year, I was there next to her, holding her hand, but there was nothing I could do. So she gave me a year of my life to stop and just let the soul grieve and be there, in touch with the soul, which I never was before, because I was always in a hurry. So she gave me that chance.”
In her book, Allende describes an amazingly vivid and visual spiritual trip that she took on the Amazonian shamanic drug called ‘ayahuasca’. It’s the kind of thing that is widely frowned on by the authorities, in the new anti-consciousness raising mood of the times, where compliance is the new religion. Not that she cares.
“It opened a space that I would never have accessed without the drug,” she says. “But I would never take it again. I’m too old. It was very hard on my body. Also, I reached the point where I learned something, so I don’t need to do it again. I did it once and it was three days of an extraordinary journey. But it wasn’t like that for my husband – for him it was six hours of hell. For me it was absolutely healing. It put me in touch with death and Paula and the other world, and I came back like another person.”
Of the experience, Allende writes in The Sum of Our Days:
“Of all the adventures in a lifetime of upheaval, the only thing I can compare to that visit to the dimension of the shamans was your death, daughter. On both occasions something inexplicable and profound happened that transformed me. I was never the same after your last night in this world, or after I drank that powerful potion: I lost my fear of death and experienced the eternity of the spirit.”

The Sum of Our Days is published by 4th Estate. Isabel Allende speaks on ‘Living With Passion’ and her work promoting social justice for women throughout the world on April 25, 7-9pm at the RDS in Dublin. For information, visit www.seminars.ie