Writing the wrongs

ISABEL ALLENDE does everything in Spanish – she dreams, cooks, yells at her beloved grandchildren when they're naughty and, of course, writes her bestselling books in her native language. "I even make love in Spanish. I would feel a fool panting in English," she says, greedily spooning the chocolatey froth off her cappuccino.

"It is decaffeinated, isn't it?" she asks the waitress in the London hotel in which she is staying on her British book tour. "If I have any more caffeine, I will be like this," impersonating a silken-clad jumping bean. "I am too much that way anyway."

She can say that again. Allende may be tiny but she packs a powerful, passionate punch, both in print and in person. She is, she alleges, a lipsticked Amazon who slays her own dragons.

Although she claims to be jet-lagged after flying from London to Barcelona, with her husband Willie Gordon – for the day for the city's Book Day, when everyone is given a book and a red rose – she looks wonderful. Gamine featured, with an enviably smooth, pale complexion and lively, watchful eyes the colour of dark chocolate, she is a fierce 65 years old, although she sure as hell doesn't look it. Which, knocking on wood, she attributes to good health and incontinent greed.

"I love dark coffee, wine, chocolate, caviar and vodka, rich, spicy food – everything that's bad for you. I don't stint myself."

Perhaps it's also something to do with living in California, among acupuncturists, earth mothers, vegetarian masseuses and spiritual crones who take workshops on how to become goddesses. Half the population is in recovery, the other half, she says, is into crystals, gurus, Tantric sex or saving whales.

Indeed, Allende herself relishes inhabiting a world of Jacuzzis, Zen sessions, consultations with Asian therapists and astrologers, and is a committed member of a women's mutual self-help group, The Sisters of Disorder.

Then there's her family. With a family like Allende's, who needs imagination? This is, after all, a Latin-American woman, the daughter of a diplomat, born in Peru and raised in Chile with a clairvoyant grandmother, who could make a table dance across a room, and a grandfather who once saw the green, cloven-hoofed Devil on a bus. Oh, and there was the aunt whose shoulder blades sprouted angel wings.

Yet all of this pales by comparison against the ongoing fantastical saga of Allende's life and that of her extended tribe, her clan as she calls them. She has remarkable tales to tell. Among them the tragic disappearance, perhaps murder, of a heroin-addicted step-daughter, one of her husband's three troubled children, all drug addicts.

His is a family that has caused him immense suffering, Allende remarks, a family that was not so much dysfunctional as a huge mess, as she discovered when she fell in lust with him at one of her readings over 20 years ago.

"It's a soap opera!" she exclaims cheerfully.

In her latest book, the memoir The Sum of Our Days, she still inhabits a world of melodrama, omens and spiritual encounters, but it is one on which reality has tragically impinged. Her extraordinary family history had often made her unable to separate fantasy from reality. But, in 1992, came the untimely death of Paula, her only daughter, at the age of 28. Devastated by her child's death – a victim of the rare genetic disease porphyria, Paula died of complications caused by medical error – Allende wrote her masterpiece, Paula, a profoundly moving memoir and a cathartic love letter addressed to her daughter. The book, like her others – she is the acclaimed author of 17 books, including the magical realist novel The House of the Spirits, which have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide – has been translated into 27 languages.

The Sum of Our Days is an unflinching sequel to Paula. In it she takes up the story of her turbulent life after her daughter's death and it is likewise addressed to her.

"I tell the story to Paula because she's never left me. Death is a terrible inconvenience, but it is not an obstacle for communication with a soul. I don't see my daughter's ghost, but she is always with me. I also keep her memory alive through the foundation I created after her death to honour her work.

"The mission is the empowerment of women and children and the foundation is funded by the royalties from Paula, since I did not want anybody thinking I was profiting from my daughter's death. "

On a trip to India with Willie, she was in the middle of nowhere when a very poor woman handed her a package of rags. When she opened it, she found a baby girl. "Our driver snatched the baby away and gave it back to the woman. When my husband said, 'Why would she give her baby away?' (the answer came] 'Because it's a girl, who wants a girl?' That gave me the idea that all over the world, women and girls are always the victims. So I created the foundation."

Meanwhile, Willie's daughter gave birth to a child, Sabrina, before disappearing. Allende speaks movingly of the baby's struggle to live with the consequences of her mother's addiction, and of the unconditional love she has found with her two adoptive lesbian mothers, one of whom is a Buddhist nun.

While Allende and her husband were in India, they slept one night in a Maharajah's palace. They were woken by a telephone call from her formerly homophobic daughter-in-law Celia – her son Nico's wife and the mother of his three children – ringing to say that she was about to leave her husband and move in with Allende's stepson Jason's girlfriend Sally, who, by the way, had also had a fling with Paula's widower, Ernesto.

Both Allende's only son and his two daughters – he also has a son – have porphyria. In 1999, Nico became unwell after having a couple of wisdom teeth removed. He'd been given a general anaesthetic, something that is dangerous for people with porphyria. Months of suffering followed for him and anguish for the rest of the family.

"I had thought that after losing Paula, nothing could ever move me that much again, but just the hint that something similar was happening to my son rocked me off my feet," says Allende. Nico recovered but the results of the porphyria tests for Andrea and Nicole came as bad news.

"We knew we would have to live with the fear of another tragedy."

Indeed, Andrea caught pneumonia and was very ill, because she can't take antibiotics. The entire tribe was there to celebrate her eventual recovery. "Porphryia is worse for women, because hormonal changes can trigger it. When my granddaughters get menstrual cramps, I'm sometimes filled with dread because that's how the illness can manifest itself. But we also live with the knowledge and that what happened to Paula was not because of porphyria but malpractice in the hospital. I can't live my life in constant fear."

Allende speaks and writes from the heart, a fact of which she is painfully aware. Her son tells her that it's not easy to have a writer in the family. "Everything!" she exclaims, "Everything is grist to my mill."

"I need to write everything because I see the world in terms of stories. I see the people I love the most in terms of stories. I gave the manuscript of The Sum of Our Days to everyone who is mentioned in it. Everyone came back to me with a different version. I have to ask myself are their stories mine to tell? It's very invasive, that lack of privacy I've given my family. If I have to choose between a relative and a good story, I always take the story.

"One of my stepchildren asked not to be in the book, however, so I had to rewrite it. He's had a difficult life, terrible problems with drug addiction and has been in jail for 12 years. That can break a family. That is why my husband and I and the family have been in therapy."



Is she difficult to live with? "Very difficult. Half my life is very public, the other half very private. I need to be on my own to write, but I am also bossy. When I found a new wife for Nico I still had a key to their house and I would go at dawn to wake my grandchildren with a kiss and surprise my daughter-in-law, Lori, coming out of the shower.

"Once, I even rearranged their livingroom to accommodate the gift of a new carpet. Nico and Lori have begged me to stop interfering. I've tried , but I stick my nose into things I shouldn't, she sighs. I'm such a busybody, but I'm a good matchmaker." Nico and Lori are very happy after almost 11 years together.

Does she have regrets? "Oh yes, many, many regrets, mostly the fact that I walked out on a good marriage to my first husband, Miguel, and abandoned our children, Nico and Paula, when I was 35 and ran off with another man for three months. I did it out of lust, to satisfy my own selfish sexual desires. I regret that very much because I hurt so many people.

"If I had my time over again, I would not do that, but I was raised a Catholic so guilt is my constant burden."

• The Sum of Our Days by Isabel Allende (Fourth Estate, £17.99)

LIFE AND TIMES

1942

Born in Lima, Peru to Tomás Allende, a Chilean diplomatic official, and Francisca Llona, known as "Doña Panchita".

1953-58

Attends an American school in Bolivia, and an English school in Beirut. Finishes her schooling in Chile in 1958.

1958

Meets her future husband, Miguel Frías, an engineering student. They marry in 1962.

1963

Her daughter Paula is born. Her son Nicolás is born in 1966.

1973

A coup takes place in Chile, lead by General Augusto Pinochet. Elected socialist president Salvador Allende – her father's cousin – dies: some suspect assassination, the government says he took his own life.

1975

The family moves to Venezuela and stays for 13 years. Isabel contributes to the Caracas newspaper El Nacional.

1981

Learning that her 99-year-old grandfather is dying, she begins to write him a letter that will turn into the manuscript of her novel The House of the Spirits. It is published in 1982.

1984

Of Love and Shadows is published.

1987

Divorces Miguel Frías. Eva Luna is published.

1988

Marries Willie Gordon in San Francisco. They move to San Rafael, California.

1990

In Chile, democracy is re-established. Isabel returns to receive the Gabriela Mistral cultural award.

1991

Her daughter Paula suffers a porphyria attack and goes into a coma in Madrid.

1992

Paula dies on 6 December, in Isabel and Willie's home.

1993

The House of the Spirits film is released, starring Winona Ryder, Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep and Antonio Banderas.

1994

Paula is published. Of Love and Shadows is made into a film, starring Antonio Banderas.

1998

Receives the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, granted to those "who have contributed to the beauty of the world".

2000

Portrait in Sepia is published in Europe. Allende is a guest on Oprah Winfrey's chatshow.

2008

The Sum of Our Days, Allende's new memoir, is published.