In 1969, author Isabel Allende got a call saying a relative had died from a heart attack in the street, and she needed to go to the morgue to identify the body. “I went expecting to see my brother,” she recalls. “But then I saw this corpse and I felt relief. I told them, ‘This is not my brother. I do not recognise this man.’”
And so Allende’s stepfather, Ramón, was called and was able to identify the body as that of Tomás Allende, Isabel’s father, who left the family when she was three. “My stepfather said, ‘Look at him. He’s your father.’ But I felt nothing. No compassion, no sadness. I had no memories of him so there was no connection at all.”
These paternal dynamics are threaded through My Name is Emilia Del Valle, the latest novel frome the Chilean-American, set in the late 19th century. It tells of a young woman raised in California who becomes a journalist and reports on the Chilean civil war which ravaged the country in 1891. Emilia has never met her birth father, who is Chilean and who left her mother before she was born. Allende describes her heroine as “defiant, rebellious and curious. She’s been brought up by a stepfather who is supportive of her intellect and gives her confidence. And that’s a homage to my stepfather who did that for me.”
Allende, 82, is talking over Zoom from her home office in San Francisco, where she lives with her third husband Roger Cukras, and their two dogs. A novelist, sometime children’s writer and avowed feminist, Allende has sold 80 million books which have been translated into 42 languages. Her first, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982 and quickly became a bestseller; since then there have been dozens more novels including Daughter of Fortune, Inés of my Soul and City of the Beasts, all covering themes of family, history, displacement and the lives of women.
In 2014, Barack Obama awarded Allende – by then an American citizen – the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour. And last year Mattel, makers of Barbie, launched a limited-edition Isabel Allende doll. When I ask Allende about it, she grins and disappears. She returns a minute later holding the doll which is still in its case, resplendent in a red evening dress, black heels – the real-life Allende always wears heels – and holding a copy of The House of The Spirits. At the doll’s feet is a tiny model of her dog, Perla.
For My Name is Emilia Del Valle, Allende wanted to write about the 1891 Chilean civil war in part because it is a forgotten chapter in Chile’s history, in which thousands died. But she was also drawn to it for to its similarities to the military coup in Chile in 1973, which she witnessed first-hand. Allende was living with her husband and children in Santiago when the socialist president Salvador Allende – who was her father’s cousin – was ousted and replaced by a dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet.
“In both instances,” she says, “there was a visionary progressive president [who was] opposed by conservatives. In the first case of José Balmaceda, the armed forces split and we had a horrible civil war. But in the second [in 1973], all the armed forces supported the opposition against Allende’s government. And so, instead of a civil war, we had a military coup that lasted 17 years.”
In the months after the coup, Allende got involved with the resistance movement “doing things that were absolutely forbidden, like moving or hiding [Pinochet’s political opponents] and trying to get them into the embassies for asylum. But I didn’t know the consequences. A military dictatorship was new for us, we had no idea what that was. And then I felt the noose of repression becoming tight around my neck and I realised I had to get out.”
Allende fled to Venezuela, then one of the few Latin American countries that was a democracy and was accepting refugees; her husband and children followed soon after. “I never expected the dictatorship to last 17 years,” she reflects. “I thought it would be a few months and there would be elections and we could go back.”
While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing The House of the Spirits. Back in Chile she had been working as a journalist on a feminist magazine, which she loved, and “I had never had the dream [to write novels]. My only dream then was to support myself and my kids.” The novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather where she recounted the stories he had told her as a child. That letter turned into a manuscript telling an epic tale spanning four generations of one family.
“All the anecdotes from my family were in it,” she recalls, “starting with my great-aunt Rosa who was my grandfather’s fiancé and who died in mysterious circumstances before the wedding. Then, eight years later, my grandfather married Rosa’s younger sister. That was Clara in the book and she is my grandmother.”
Allende briefly fell out with some of her relatives who were aggrieved at having their lives plundered for fiction, though it didn’t put her off. “I think any author draws from their experiences, their memories, their biography and the things and people they care about,” she says.
As well as writing fiction, Allende has made forays into memoir, in 2021’s The Soul of a Woman, which told of her mother, Panchita, who, having been abandoned by Isabel’s father, was excommunicated by the Catholic church for annulling her first marriage and marrying a divorcee. And before that there was 1994’s Paula, about Allende’s daughter who died at 29 after falling into a coma from the genetic disorder porphyria.
In her daughter’s honour, the author founded The Isabel Allende Foundation to help fight for the rights of women and girls. Funded by the income from her books, it distributes grants to organisations combating violence against women and advocating for education, reproductive rights and more. “It’s now run by my daughter-in-law, Lori. I get the credit but she does the work,” she says.
But Allende is now concerned about the foundation’s ability to operate in the US “because our programmes are targeted by the Trump administration. Anybody who supports certain organisations that [the administration] doesn’t like can be accused of supporting terrorism. That is what is happening today in the United States.” Allende adds that she is “less scared and angry [about Trump] than most people around me because I have seen it before. Nothing is for ever. What I keep saying is, ‘People only have the power that you give them. Don’t be scared, because fear paralyses people.’ And I know that because I have been afraid.”
Now, 43 years on from her debut, Allende still writes every day because, she says, “I love the process.” She rises every morning around six, makes coffee, hands the dogs over to the dog-walker and does an hour of exercise before settling down in her office to work. Each book “starts with the seed of an idea. Then I start to research and ask questions of my characters: why would she have this job, or start this relationship, or go to this place? It’s like I have all these pieces of a puzzle that I have to put together even though I don’t know the design. But with enough patience, the puzzle will be done and there will be a story ready to go out into the world.”
‘My Name is Emilia Del Valle’ is out now, published by Bloomsbury at £18.99
