Isabel Allende remembers when she wrote the first sentence of her novel "The House of the Spirits"

Isabel Allende, one of the world's most widely read authors with more than 75 million books sold and translated into 42 languages, is commemorating the 40th anniversary of her first novel, "The House of the Spirits."

The award-winning Chilean writer confessed in an interview with Camilo that at that time she "wrote the first sentence of something that I didn't know what it was."

Her novel began as a spiritual letter to her sick grandfather and she wrote it while living in exile in Venezuela, in the kitchen of her apartment.