Isabel Allende: "There is a real war against women"

He began publishing at the age of 40, but his first worldwide success,

, has been followed by almost 30 books, of which he has sold around 70 million in 42 languages. Today, about to turn 80 —she was born on August 2, 1942 in Lima—, Isabel Allende lives semi-secluded in San Francisco without infertile nostalgia that binds her to lament in times of pandemic. Rather, those nostalgias have served him to string together

(Plaza & Janés), his latest novel after having published

. His new work begins in the twenties, with the Spanish flu, and ends 100 years later, in the midst of this scenario. A perfect ellipsis to pay homage to her mother's generation. Although within its pages she also bustles with her usual themes: domination, power, women's aspirations to conquer forbidden spaces, freedom, loyalty, love... She believes that Chile deserves its chance with Gabriel Boric, She is proud of having become a passionate old woman, she speaks openly about her marriages and relationships, about the death of her daughter Paula, about the fact that her son Nicolás has forbidden her to include him in her memoirs anymore, about her aphrodisiac experiences, about the fear of complicating her life for love that she sees in her grandchildren's generation… “They have to suffer; but,How will they know what life is?

His new novel,

See, it was almost natural for it to come out that way.

The idea was born when my mother died, a year before the pandemic.

If he had lived another year, he would have been 100 years old, a century.

It was born in a pandemic, because the flu reached Chile in 1920, and it would have died in another.

When he passed away, many told me to write his story.

We had an extraordinary relationship.

But her existence was not because she was always subject, first to her father and then to her husband.

There is no personal fulfillment for a woman if she cannot support herself.

If you depend on someone else to pay your bills, you have to lower the bow.

And that was the fate of my mother, despite being a super creative woman.

When writing, without knowing what Violeta would become, I think that deep down she is that woman that I would have liked my mother to be.

His mother was an artist, she painted.

She painted and had an eye for business… Yes, if her father and her husband had listened to her, they would have ended up rich.

She instinctively knew where to invest.

What differentiates your generation from your mother's?

In a short time a great gap was created.

My generation took to the streets, many went to university, although I did not;

they looked for work, just that, they earned a living.

But in a specific social class.

The most humble and hardworking have always supported their family, I speak of that class in which girls were educated to be wives and mothers.

You have always been concerned with inventing women who break and tear.

I am surrounded by them!

Extraordinary women.

Many times I find a human model to develop as a character, but reality surpasses me because they achieve things that I would never have dreamed of.

You know, reality itself is often an exaggeration... Should we suppress it with fiction?

Exactly.

When I wrote

, based on my second husband, William Gordon, there were critics who argued that all that could happen to no one and I had to cut it to make it believable.

Fiction must be believable, and life, sometimes, is not.

Have you done the exercise of thinking what are the obsessions of your work?

What questions are still valid in it and what answers do not find?

They are always the same: love and death.

Violence, the need for justice, loyalty and courage.

And a subject that obsesses me: power with impunity, both in the family and in society.

Feminism has been left in the inkwell.

You say that the key to this movement is not what women have between their legs, but between their ears.

Of course, that has marked my life!

We live in a patriarchy.

Morality, laws, everything is done mostly by men.

We women must find loopholes to let our voices be heard.

We are getting more and more.

But missing.

There is a real war against women.

The problem in the West is that there is a far right that maintains that this patriarchy is in danger and that those loopholes to which you allude are already too many.

What do we do?

Didn't I tell you that we live under a patriarchy?

In this logic, any conquest of the other side is not convenient.

But the women have been tearing the situation little by little.

And they will, but I won't be alive to see it.

Even so, I am feeling underground that energy of young people.

Look what just happened in Chile.

That's what I was going for.

A young man like Gabriel Boric, 35, has won... Who voted for him?

63% of women, three out of four young people too.

I feel that energy, that's why I'm very optimistic about the future.

They are not going to sit idly by in the hands of these goons who run the world.

of these elders.

What do you think crystallized these elections?

What has been going on for many years.

Inequality, discontent, corruption and impunity produced the social explosion of 2019. They did not know very well what they were claiming.

It wasn't just the price of the subway, although that served as an excuse: it was the privatizations, the state of education, the scandalously miserable pensions, the complete corruption of the entire system.

They demanded a new Constitution.

Democratic, not imposed from above as has happened with all of them from the beginning, but less so than any that emanated from a dictatorship.

The pandemic sent everyone home and that seemed to be frozen, but the election comes and what had not been forgotten resurfaces, far from it.

Things happen there.

Of course.

If Boric manages to do half of what he intends, it will already be progress.

His acceptance speech summarizes in 17 minutes the great aspirations that I have for Chile: inclusion, equality, women, diversity, democracy, respect for nature.

If he succeeds, it will be a huge step forward... If not, the CIA gets involved, of course.

I see her very excited about her new president.

But to those who claim that Chile can end up like Venezuela, what would you say?

Chile is not Venezuela.

Not even Boric is Nicolás Maduro.

You have to give it a try, right?

The most important thing is to placate corruption, which devours everything.

People shouted in the street: "No to impunity!"

They cried out for dignity, not only of the wounds of the dictatorship, but of those who steal the country.

How has the young woman who had to go into exile been stirred up inside during these months of campaigning?

Note that nothing, it's been a long time.

We live in another country, in another world.

I see a small wink from Boric to Allende.

But I never think about that girl anymore.

Is it someone who has definitely left behind?

Yes, deep down, when I go to Chile, I feel like a foreigner.

The dictatorship changed it completely.

It is another country.

I feel Chilean if I talk to people, but if I go there, I feel as foreign as in the United States, where I live.

Isabel Allende in the garden of her house.

Lori Barra

Does it define itself, therefore, as foreign and not at all nostalgic?

I am nostalgic for that time when I felt I belonged somewhere.

But it is a sentimental, romantic and very unrealistic nostalgia.

A nostalgia, instead, good for your work?

Yes, because my roots nourish me there.

This last book, for example, although I never mention it, I would not have been able to write it if it had not come from Chile.

I carry it here, in my heart.

Violeta also carries her things in her heart.

For example, when one makes the formula “wife plus mother equals boredom”, it is mathematics.

Isn't that the same equation that you confess to having experienced in your first marriage?

Yes, it certainly draws from personal experiences.

Just like Violeta's first husband, so was my first husband, Miguel Frías.

Respectable and good people.

Then came that passionate passion that I experienced in Venezuela with an Argentine.

He made me leave that first husband and my children, but it didn't last long, I quickly became disillusioned.

When I feel that affection, respect and admiration are over, that's it.

Enough then!

Bye!

Still, he remarried.

Yes, with a fascinating, adventurous man, who at first you don't know if he is a criminal or not, that was Willie Gordon.

But that also ended when I noticed that the affection on his part had ended.

I could have gone on, but I barely noticed, too: "Bye!"

I got divorced when I was 74 years old and people told me: “But how?

You're going to be alone".

Well, I think it takes more courage to stay in a relationship that isn't working than it does to leave.

And then Roger shows up in her life.

Third couple.

Roger gives me what I need: lots of love.

I can get the rest by myself.

But I can't afford that unless it's given to me.

And he gives it to me!

Does this fulfill her aspiration to become what she was looking for: a passionate old woman?

I've been training my whole life for that.

Do not think that you reach old age with more passion, you must train.

How?

Taking risks.

Throwing yourself into an adventure, participating in life with curiosity for others and for the world, without settling down where you feel good.

I see young people the age of my grandchildren who have cautious relationships, who do not want to suffer.

What are you going to do with your life if you don't want to suffer?

They are often overprotected by parents.

Is that good or unrealistic?

Wouldn't it be better if they suffered a little more?

That's what I say, let them suffer a little.

Gentle neglect works well with children.

That's how I educated Paula and Nicolás.

With three simultaneous jobs like I had when I raised them, I didn't have time to keep an eye on what they were doing.

I guess they took a lot of risks and did stupid things, but they also formed without me monitoring everything.

The happiest moments of his life, he says, were when he held them for the first time, and the saddest, when he held a dying Paula.

Have you been able to turn that sorrow into something positive?

Yes, in action.

Write the book about my daughter,

, helped me put that into words, to understand what had happened. His long agony of a year was a dark night. Everything was a nebula of pain and anguish. When I sorted it out, based on things I had written to my mother and notes I took, I realized that my daughter's only way out was death. I had to accept it, understand it, try to free myself from the anger that I had accumulated due to that negligence that caused severe brain damage. Nobody tried to hurt her on purpose, it was a series of circumstances. I received thousands of letters, there was no internet. And by answering them, all of them, I developed a communication process with people. Everyone has suffered loss and pain. That was extraordinary. I feel Paula everywhere, I will not say that I am seeing ghosts, but she is very strong.And the proceeds from that book went to a foundation that is dedicated to doing what she would be doing if she were alive, defending the fundamental rights of women and children.

Isabel Allende at her home in Sausalito, in the San Francisco Bay Area, in December 2021. Lori Barra

What is more painful and festive?

Write about one's parents or about the children?

I don't know… I use them all: parents, grandparents, children, cousins… When I published

, my son Nicolás told me: “Please, mom, never write about me again.

I have a private life and I don't want to expose my family."

And I didn't do it again.

15 years have passed since that memory and no more.

Why?

You can write about more things with your memory, as you did in

He complains that it affected his private life.

I published in that memory the fertility treatment that he and his wife followed to have children.

Many people stopped them on the street, they felt exposed.

Then my son's divorce was very weird.

He married a Venezuelan girl, they had three children in five years and she fell in love with my stepson's girlfriend.

Okay…

The two girls left and the two boys were left hanging from the brush with three children in diapers in between.

It was novel!

How was I going to miss it?

Clear!

What danger do you have at home!

Okay, it meant exposing the family.

But the story was too good.

After

And I was lucky that book was published four months before Viagra came out.

If not, not even a copy would have been sold.

Goodness!

After publishing Paula I got the clubbing.

I couldn't write anything.

Everything came out flat, gray, boring, impossible.

I remembered that I was a journalist and I looked for a topic that was the furthest from mourning: love, gluttony, sex.

And the bridge between that is aphrodisiacs, so by researching and trying the recipes with friends…

Tell me which ones really work.

None, the only thing that works is the imagination.

No dressings?

If you can season it, all the better, but it's all in the brain, not the genitals.

The same in men as in women?

Especially in women, who romanticize everything, we get sentimental, we invent stories because that seems to us much more stimulating than anything else.

Men are very visual.

exists

yet.

They have tried to make these magazines for women and they do not work.

Homosexuals buy them.

We are not excited to see a half-naked man, we are excited to have something blown in our ear.

The G-spot is in the ear, you don't have to look for it elsewhere.

Wise advice at almost 80 years old!

I almost have them!

And welcome.

Also when writing?

Do you plan the books a lot?

Noooo!

Except if they deal with historical episodes.

I have already learned after 40 years of writing to relax, not to try to force either the story or the characters with what I previously believe it should be.

If I let myself be carried away by instinct and enjoyment, gradually discovering what is happening, it generally works much better.

There is a very intuitive part of writing.

How much do you miss who was your agent, Carmen Balcells?

Very much!

Not only as an agent, she was a very good friend.

If I had a problem, I called her.

It not only provided a practical solution, but also magical and sentimental.

I had an Italian astrologer;

when I sent him a manuscript, he told me: “Wait, I'm talking to the astrologer!”.

Did he never tell you what he once replied to García Márquez?

One day he called her and asked, "Do you love me, Carmen?"

She replied: "Look, Gabriel, I can't answer that question because you account for 36% of my billing...".

No, although he told me: "Remember, I'm your agent, not your friend."

He was closed to accepting that personal involvement, but one day he confessed to me that loneliness weighed on him, yes, that he felt pleasure eating and doing business, but that he suffered from loneliness, he did not accept his sentimental part.

Many consider you one of the very few female voices of the Latin American Boom, that very masculine phenomenon.

Well, that's what they said when

appeared , that I was the only woman in that movement.

But they quickly deleted me, I don't know why, and tagged me as post Boom.

And you know what?

Nobody likes to be considered after anything.

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