“I seek truth and beauty in the transparency of an autumn leaf, in the perfect form of a seashell on the beach, in the curve of a woman’s back, in the texture of an ancient tree trunk, but also in the elusive forms of reality,” writes internationally acclaimed author Isabel Allende in her 2000 novel Portrait in Sepia. Finding beauty and viewing the world with a unique perspective is what Allende does best; as such, her books are used in school curricula worldwide, particularly her critically acclaimed 1982 debut novel, The House of the Spirits. I was bewitched by Allende’s fascinating realm of magical realism in my sophomore year of high school and have yet to find another author who so astutely explores the effect of politics on society under a metaphysical influence.
Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. She fled to Venezuela in the 1970s after dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew her cousin President Salvador Allende in a military coup. Her novels, which explore universal themes of isolation, civil unrest, and humanity’s capacity for love, have been translated into more than 30 languages. Over the phone from her home in Northern California, Allende kindly shared with me her positions on writing and the nation’s current political situation.
You began your writing career at 39. Did you write as a younger person, even if it was purely for yourself? I was very busy supporting a family with three jobs, and I was a journalist. Journalists in Chile don’t make much money. So I had to juggle working at a magazine, on TV, doing lots of things in order to make a living. Then we had the military coup in Chile in September of 1973 and I had to get out of my country. In Venezuela, I could not find a job as a journalist, and I started working in things that had nothing to do with literature. When I started my first book in 1981, I had all these stories inside that I needed to tell, and that was my first experience with fiction, although I’d written theater plays.