the Chilean author on her life and career

Author Isabel Allende knows how she wants to die: “At home, with warm socks and a dog. Any dog is fine. Could be my dog or any other dog. Just a dog.”

The 81-year-old Chilean writer says that with any animal — dogs, cats, even birds — her heart is completely open. She is a better person around them: kinder, more tolerant, more patient, funnier and happier.

“Any dog in the street makes me happy,” Allende says. “But because I now live in California, I have to ask permission to touch someone’s dog. Once I do, we end up kissing.”

To satisfy her dog walker’s three-year-old granddaughter, who visits every Tuesday and Thursday evening and badgers her to read one book repeatedly, the author wrote Perla: The Mighty Dogfeaturing her rescue dog of the same name.

Perla came to Allende via her second husband, Willie, from whom she separated in 2015, aged 72. Upon his death in 2019, she acquired the small, smart and now unwanted pet.

Allende’s endearingly illustrated picture book is inspired by an attack at the local dog park, when her hound roared and scared off a bulkier animal.

“The story is about bullies,” she says. “They are cowards and you have to stand up to them. Kids confront bullying at school, especially a kid like Nico in the book, who has glasses and is not athletic. In the same sense that a kid confronts that in school, I have been disrespected, pushed around and ignored. I think most women experience that.”

Allende has owned a dog for the majority of her life, the first when her mother, Panchita, placed a puppy named Betty in her cradle in Lima, Peru. Smooth haired or rough-haired, canines provided the lasting companionship that her father, Tomás, a Chilean diplomat, could not.

The writer has no memories of her father, who abandoned her and her two brothers when she was three. His imprint, however, remains as she struggles to create loving, present fathers in her novels. “The fathers in my books are either dead or absent,” she says. “Or so authoritarian that they are removed from their emotions and those of the protagonist.”

“The fathers in my books are either dead or absent. Or so authoritarian that they are removed from their emotions and those of the protagonist.”

ISABEL ALLENDE

Following the annulment of Panchita’s marriage, and left with no means of support, the young family returned to Santiago to live with Allende’s grandparents. Her grandmother died shortly after. In The Soul of a Womanher 2020 work of feminist musings, Allende wrote: “All joy disappeared from the house after my grandmother’s premature death.”

In the conservative, patriarchal household, completed by her bachelor uncles, Allende witnessed her grandfather’s control over money. In a culture in which women did not work, while Panchita’s children were fed and their school needs met, Panchita was denied funds of her own.

“My mother was destitute in that large house,” she says. “She had no money to take us out. She could not buy us ice-cream. In a subtle way, she was being punished because she married against her parents’ will. It was like, ‘Okay, we’ll take care of you, but you are not getting anything extra.’

“I understood immediately that there is no independence if you cannot support yourself. So as soon as I got out of school I started working.”

In 1953, her mother married Ramón Huidobro, a career diplomat whose postings took the family to Bolivia and Lebanon, where Allende was educated. She shared a room with a stepsister with whom she did not gel, which made for a lonely adolescence.

“I was always displaced and didn’t have any friends,” she says. “My mother and stepfather fought like crazy. Reading was my refuge. I had this obsession with justice, poverty and feminism. Instead of worrying about boyfriends, I worried about children in China dying of starvation.

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“I did not like myself at all. I was not pretty. I was not sweet. I was not likeable in any way.”

While completing secondary school in Chile, the 15-year-old Allende met Miguel, an engineering student. She married at 19, then landed a secretarial job for the United Nations in Santiago, which morphed into TV presenter role due to her alcoholic boss’s inability to perform that job.

Awarded a journalism scholarship in Belgium, the couple and their young daughter, Paula, moved to Europe. Upon their return to Chile, their son Nicolás was born. Paula magazine, Chile’s first feminist publication for women, which discussed issues such as domestic violence and rape, hired the journalism graduate.

“The reaction of the patriarchy was brutal,” she says of the magazine. “So we [Paula’s staff] became hairy, ugly women who couldn’t catch a man, which explained why we thought this way. Many young women would believe what we said but wouldn’t admit they were feminists, as the word was an insult.”

In 1970, her father’s cousin, Salvador Allende, became Chile’s first socialist president. Three years later, he died in a military coup. Blacklisted by the incoming Pinochet government, Isabel, Miguel and their children went into exile in Venezuela, where they lived for 13 years.

“It was a time of great sadness,” she says. “When we left Chile, we closed the door and put the key in a pocket. We were coming back. I think I still have the key somewhere.”

While working two shifts at a secondary school, she began writing letters to her dying 99-year-old grandfather. She retold the stories he’d told her, such as how the tables in the house would dance because her clairvoyant grandmother’s spirit was moving them.

After a year of nights and weekends writing at the kitchen table, she had The House of the Spiritsthe 1982 book that saw her quit her administrative position. By her fourth novel, 1987’s Eva Luna, Allende was a bestselling author worldwide.

Yet her 50th year brought with it tragedy when her daughter Paula, now 29, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, lapsed into a coma and died. A year of agony informed Paulathe author’s debut memoir. Then she established The Isabel Allende Foundation, which works to preserve the rights of women and girls, in Paula’s honour. This is where Allende directs the bulk of her wealth.

“One organisation, Too Young to Wed, works mostly in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,” she says of a group the foundation supports. “In poor families, the father sells the daughter into premature marriage. Sometimes a girl is eight and is with a man who could be her grandfather. She will be sexually abused, in servitude, beaten and get pregnant before her body is ready for that. This organisation rescues girls. Each rescued girl is an achievement.”

In 2019, six days after a hemorrhage, Panchita died in her daughter’s arms. Allende called their relationship, “the longest love affair of my life”. Since 1987, they had exchanged daily letters.

Following her mother’s death, and to inform her third memoir, which resumes where 2007’s The Sum of Our Days concludes, Allende began reading Panchita’s grammatically precise Spanish correspondence and her own replies.

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From the 24,000 letters, archived in a separate box for each year (she’s currently up to June 2008), she seeks to remember the events of her life — 90 per cent of which she says she’s forgotten.

“I’ve discovered what I was dealing with,” she says of the insights gained. “With the beginning of the deterioration of the relationship with my [second] husband, Willie, I can see now, from a distance, the stress we were under. His three addicted children died from drug-related causes and my daughter Paula died. No couple can survive something like that.

“There was a point where Willie wanted to be free. To have a girlfriend who would not be an old lady like me but young and beautiful. And so there was an indifference.

“I also discovered, for the first time, how much I worked,” says the writer, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2014. “I’ve worked my entire life – even in the midst of drug-addicted children, the death of my daughter and the divorce of my son, I was writing. I wrote 27 books amid all this upheaval. So I look back and see that writing really saved me.”

Allende married New York lawyer Roger Cukras four years ago. Unlike her mother, who yearned for widowhood due to her husband’s dementia and nastiness (“for 15 years she had the black widow dress hanging in her closet”), Allende champions marriage.

“Look, if I live long enough, I might marry a fourth time,” she laughs. “Say Roger dies and I’m still alive, I might get another husband. Who knows?

“In my domestic life I like the presence of another person. I have been married most of my life. I married very young, divorced my husband, met Willie three months later. And when we divorced, I was alone for about a year: it was a strange time. I bought a little house and moved there with my dog, and then Roger appeared in my life.

“I think I am a good companion,” she concludes. “I am incredibly independent, so I don’t ask much. I don’t have many needs and I can also be very kind.”

Married or unmarried, Allende has Perla.

Perla: The Mighty Dog (Bloomsbury) by Isabel Allende is out now.

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