What she said about her other books

This is a P.S. to yesterday's blog post, as I'd not yet recorded all of Isabel Allende's comments.

Of the "seventeen or eighteen" books she has written (she seems to have lost count), the one that earned the warmest response from her readers was Paula, although at the beginning she doubted whether she would ever bring herself to publish it, since it was a memoir written for her daughter who had fallen into a coma and died; it was her son-in-law (Paula's husband) who persuaded her to get it published. The second volume, La Suma de los Dias, opening with the scattering of her daughter's ashes, describes the last thirteen years of Isabel Allende's life. She had to bring the book to a conclusion in 2006, because her life keeps changing and she wouldn't have been able to keep up otherwise. "It's my nature to expose myself and my family," she said, admitting that her family therefore tries to keep some secrets from her!

Isabel Allende was very candid about her novel The Infinite Plan, which is apparently not as popular as the rest. She told us that when she was divorced at the age of 45, she soon met another fellow in San José, California, one day, who "told a good story". She was immediately attracted to this man and so interested in what he had begun to tell her about himself that she claims she went straight to bed with him in order to hear the rest! On their way to the airport afterwards, when she was leaving for New York, she asked him casually, "Do we have some commitment?" and got the impression he was terrified by her question. Her 20 year old son meeting her off the 'plane asked, "Whatever's the matter with you?"—"I'm in love," she said.—"Oh yes? Who is it?"—"I can't remember his name!" All her son could do at this point was to send her straight back to California to sort herself out. In the end it took her four years to learn the whole story of her lover's life, by which time she had married him, being "as tall a blonde as he was likely to get" He fancies tall blondes and is incorrigibly vain, she says: he wanted Paul Newman to play his part if they ever made a film of the life story that his wife has turned into fiction.

The other novel she spoke about was the one I'd read, Daughter of Fortune. Having moved to San Fransisco and fallen in love with the place, "only 150 years old", she became fascinated with its origins during the Gold Rush, "driven by young male testosterone and greed". She wanted to retell the story from the perspective of Mexicans, South Americans and Chinese, because it was "an event that happened to people of colour" as well as to the white men, the 49-ers, who wrote the history books. She also searched for a woman's point of view but didn't want a prostitute for her heroine, even though that seemed to be the only feasible possibility. However, during her research (she went through the Chilean archives and found letters with far more detail than ever appeared in the history books) she discovered references to women dressed as men in those early days. Sometimes their sex was only discovered when they had to be undressed for their funeral. That was when she decided to make her heroine a cross-dresser as in Shakespeare, said Isabel Allende: "I just love that stuff!"

It's interesting to note that the first volume of Gabriel García Márquez' autobiography is entitled Vivir para contarla, Living to Tell the Tale. A good title, for that is exactly what writers do, isn't it?