Finding Freedom Through Writing

"Writing Paula opened a spiritual realm for me"

Author Isabel Allende is a very happy, optimistic person, but she has had a lot of losses in life. And from each one of these losses, she has learned something. This is where most of her writing comes from. Isabel says, "Those moments of great struggle or grief force me to dig deeper and deeper into myself looking for strength that often I think I don't have."

Isabel's 29-year old daughter Paula fell sick in 1992. Isabel says, "I started writing [letters] for her so that she would remember who she was." Isabel had faith that her daughter would wake up because she was told that Paula would recover completely.

A year later, when her daughter died, Isabel was very depressed. "When my daughter died, I thought I would die as well." Isabel's mother told her that if she didn't write, she would die. So, Isabel sat down to write and sort out the confusion of what had happened. Her mother sent back 190 letters that Isabel had written so Isabel could see what had happened that year. And when the book was done, everybody thought that it was important to publish it. That's how her memoir Paula came to be.

After Isabel's daughter died, she thought she had lost everything. Isabel thought she would never recover, and is surprised even today that she has. "I'm wearing lipstick and I'm talking to you and I'm alive while she's not..." She says she learned a lot about herself and the world. "It was a rich experience."

"Death is — I always say it's an inconvenience. It's terribly inconvenient to be geographically distant the way we are when somebody dies. But then we start recreating the person, the memory, establishing with the spirit a relationship that is extraordinary. It's wonderful."

From the show Oprah's Book Club