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Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende
Announced February 17, 2000
Exclusive Essay
The most important literary influences for me have been the young adult
books, the Russian novelists and the works of Shakespeare, which
I read in my adolescence. They gave me the love of storytelling,
strong characters, drama, tragedy, great plots. Later I read a lot
of science fiction, which initiated me into the multiple possibilities
of reality, imagination, mystery. European and North American feminists
were essential to my development, they gave me an articulate language
to express the feelings that had been tormenting me since childhood,
they guided me into action, they changed my life. Thanks to them
I became a feminist journalist. Women's issues are always present
in my writing, it is one of the themes of my life, like politics,
love, family, etc. The love of words comes probably from the Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize) whose work still inspires me. The
desire to write started when I began reading the famous writers
of the Latin American Boom of Literature in the seventies (all males!).
I belong to the first generation of Latin American authors to be
brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before, the distribution
of those books was lousy, readers simply could not get them in their
countries.
My
life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses. My writing
comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief. The
first loss was my father, who left when I was so young that I have
no memories of him. Then my grandmother, who died too soon...I still
miss her! In 1973 there was a military coup in Chile and I fled
the country. Exile made me a writer. I wrote my first novel The
House of the Spirits as an attempt to recover the world that I had
lost. And the greatest of all my pains was in 1992, when my daughter
Paula fell in a coma and a year later died in my arms.
I write to
understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality,
to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!
If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die...
©
Isabel Allende 2000
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