The Interview - Isabel Allende Understands How Fear Changes a Society

Episode Date: April 26, 2025

The beloved author left Chile at a time of great turmoil and has longed for the nation of her youth ever since.

From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm guest hosting this week, filling in for Lulu. If you don't know me, I'm the editor of the New York Times Book Review and the host of the Book Review podcast. And I'm very happy to be getting the chance to talk with author Isabel Allende. At 82, Allende is one of the world's most beloved and best-selling Spanish language authors. Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages, and 80 million copies of her books have been sold around the world. Allende's newest book is called My Name is Emilia del Valle, and it's about a dark All right. All right. All right. All right. All right.

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All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. She was raised in Chile, but in 1973, when she was 31 and working as a journalist with two small children, her life was upended forever. It was then that a military coup pushed out the democratically elected President Salvador Allende, who was her cousin. She fled to Venezuela, where she wrote her first book, The House of the Spirits, which

evolved from a letter she had started to her dying grandfather. That book became a runaway bestseller, and it remains one of her best known works. She moved to the US in the late 1980s, where she has been writing steadily ever since. Here is my great shame. I know you should be really embarrassed. Whenever I go back to see family in Puerto Rico, they give me the business all the time. Of course, of course. I obviously want to talk to you about your new book, about your personal history, and of course about writing and creativity.

And I think for you, all of these things intertwine in many of your books, and they certainly do in your new novel. This is a book that is set in the 1890s, your main character heads down to witness the Chilean Civil War that is happening there. And I'm wondering what was going through your mind when you said this is the time period, this is the event, and this is what I want my character to see.

I'm fascinated with history. Most of my schooling was done abroad. So I studied very little Chilean history, but I have studied it as an adult. I look back all the time to what happened before in order to explain what's happening today in our lives. what's happening today in our lives. There are some parallels between what happened in 1891

when the president, José Manuel Balmaceda, was challenged by his economic and political enemies of the conservative party. The Navy went with the opposition, and then they had a civil war. It was brutal, brutal, bloody. And it has some parallels with what happened in 1973 in Chile with Salvador Allende. There was no civil war. There was really a brutal military coup, as we know. But both presidents committed suicide.

In both circumstances, many Chileans died. So there were some historical parallels. So it was fascinating to explore. The main character, Emilia, she shares a last name with several other characters across your body of work, including several in your first book, The House of the Spirits. Why does this name resonate with you?

What are you trying to say by sort of threading this name or this family line throughout several of your books? You know, some characters, like some people, never leave you. I wrote The House of the Spirits inspired by my relatives from my grandmother's side mostly. And they were all lunatics and wonderful extravagant people. I call them Del Valle, but really their last name is Barros.

And so I picked up those characters, some of them, and there were many others there that I didn't have enough pages for them. So they came back in other books. Look, with relatives like mine, you don't need to invent anything. So the Del Valle family will be haunting me forever. Well, speaking of relatives, Emilia, she doesn't have a relationship with her birth father. She goes looking for him. I know you did not have a relationship with your birth father. I'm curious about how your mother, Panchita, talked about your father when you were young

and how you thought about him, if at all. She never spoke about him. All the photographs in which he appeared were destroyed. And there was never a mention of his name. And when we asked, she would always say, he was a very intelligent man. That's it. She wouldn't say why he left, why we couldn't see him.

No explanation. At some point, when they were teenagers, my brothers wanted to meet him, and it was a big disappointment for them because my father had absolutely no connection with them and no interest in them. But I never looked for them. And many years later, when I was working as a journalist,

I was called to the morgue to identify a body of a man that had died in the street. And I couldn't identify him because I had never seen a picture of him. That was my father. First of all, that sounds terrible. No, it wasn't terrible because, I mean, it was terrible to see a corpse for the first time. But a corpse for the first time. But I didn't feel anything, any connection, any compassion, any longing of any kind. Emilia also doesn't have a connection to her father for much of her life.

However, the scenes in the book when Emilia does finally meet her father, not to give away too many details, I found quite moving and I was wondering what it was like to write those scenes for you. I could put myself in her place. I suppose that if I have met my father and he was an old man, sick,

anxious, depressed, sad, fearing death. I would feel compassion and I would feel close to him, but I never had that chance, so I don't know. But it was easy for me to imagine that she would behave like that. Because also she was very open-minded, Emilia. She was open to everything. Emilia, not surprisingly, given who you are,

she bucks a lot of convention for women of her time period. She goes on to become a war reporter. She writes gory dime novels about murder and vengeance. You have written, and you've said many times, that you've been a feminist since you were a child because of the way that you saw your mother and women of your mother's generation treated when you were growing up in Chile.

And I wonder, over the course of your career, has it been purposeful to write your female characters in this way, or is just like, this is the only way I know how to write women? You know, it would be very hard for me to write a novel about a submissive wife in the suburbs that waits for her husband to come back from the job. I mean, there's no story there.

You really want, you character, look, you cannot have characters with common sense. You cannot have characters who are like everybody else, who don't suffer. The story is in the tragedy, in the drama, in the struggle, in the hero's journey. That's where the story is. I write about women who are always challenging convention and get a lot of aggression for that, but they stand up and they are able to fend for themselves. Those are the characters I love and I write about them because I know them so well.

And in many ways I can connect to that because I was born in a Catholic conservative authoritarian patriarchal family in the 40s in the middle of the Second World War, women of my generation and my social class were supposed to marry and have kids, and that's it. So to get out of that prison, really, of the mind was very challenging. I belong to the first generation of women who were able, some of us, to do it. How old do you think you were when you realized it was a prison of sorts? Teenager.

When I was little, I didn't want to be dependent. I didn't, my mother says that when I was five or six, they would ask, what would you like to do when you grow up? And I would say, support myself. That was my answer. Support myself. Because I realized that because my mother could not support herself, she depended,

depended on her father, her brother, other people. And that made her very vulnerable. I didn't want that. But then later, I sort of targeted male authority. I realized that authority was always in the hands of men. In the priests, the police, my grandfather, it was always male. And then I rebelled against that,

but it didn't have a name. I didn't know that there was something called feminism. I had never heard the word. And when I was in my late teens, then I heard about feminism and about the women's movement, and I started reading a few things that gave me a more articulate language to express the anger that I had been feeling all my life. Did you have other female friends who you could sort of talk to about this?

Like this? Not about this, no. This is not great. What's going on here? We gotta break free. Oh no. I didn't because girls were into, I don't know, into trying to catch a husband, I suppose, I don't because girls were into, I don't know,

trying to catch a husband, I suppose, I don't know. I found a community of women who thought alike when I started working as a journalist in a women's magazine called Paula. And it was a fascinating time because this was the first time in Chile there was a magazine that dared publish topics that had never been touched before. So we talked about abortion, divorce, infidelity,

all those things plus politics. So we got involved also in what was going on in the streets among people, you know? So it was, but we also had fashion and beauty and decoration. It was a glossy women's magazine, but with all this information that women had not had before, it caused quite a stir.

It changed the culture. Now, many years later, 50 years later, that magazine is considered an icon in the culture in Chile. That's how important it was. That must have been so exciting. I mean, how... Oh, it was fascinating.

How was it to find a place that you felt finally? Yeah, to find a place and this young, all these women were young, they were all beautiful. They were so daring. It was just great. So early in your career, you were a journalist, you worked for this magazine, Paula, as well as several other places.

And the story goes that you met one of the most famous Chilean writers of all time, the great Chilean poet. Pablo Neruda. And he said, Isabel, maybe this isn't for you. Well, he was living in the beach in Isla Negra. He was sick, and he already had won the Nobel Prize, and he invited me to his house, and I thought he wanted me to interview him.

This was such a huge honor. I mean, everybody was so jealous in the magazine because he had chosen me to go and interview him. It was winter, and I drove raining all the way to that place, and he received me very kindly. He had lunch for me, a bottle of white wine. He showed me his collections. His collections now are considered art.

Then it was junk. And then I said, okay, Don Paulo, I really need to do the interview because it's going to get dark soon and I need to get back. What interview? He said, well, I came to interview you. Oh no, he said. Well, I came to interview you. Oh no, my dear, I would never be interviewed by you. You are the worst journalist in this country.

You put yourself always in the middle of everything. You lie all the time. And I'm sure that if you don't have a story, you make it up. Why don't you switch to literature where all these defects are virtues? I should have paid attention, but I didn't. Until many, many years later.

Let's just take a step back. You're in the home of this literary genius and he tells you something that to most people would be crushing. I was crushed too, of course. Of course I was crushed, but he said it very kindly. And I asked him then why he had invited me if he didn't want me to interview.

He said because he liked what I wrote. And sometimes he would make copies of my humorous articles and send them to his friends. And that's why he wanted to meet me. But you did not listen to him at the time. No, no I didn't. And then two months later we had the military coup. So forget about any plans for the future,

everything was disrupted forever. And it was one of those crossroads in your life in which you have to take a new direction that was completely not planned and not expected. And my career as a journalist ended there. You had to go to Venezuela because there was a military coup. What was the moment you knew it's time for me to go?

It took months and months because although in Chile, the brutality started in 24 hours and the Congress was dismissed indefinitely. There was censorship for everything. All civil rights were suspended. There was no habeas corpus, which means that a person can be arrested and they don't have to give you any explanation. And there is no hearing, there is no court. You just go to jail or disappear.

You can be tortured and nothing happens. No one is accountable. But although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly because they don't affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and those were affected immediately, but most of the population wasn't. So you think, well, I can live with this. Well, it can't be that bad.

No, it's impossible. You are in denial for a long time because you don't want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally. And then it's the time when you say, okay, I'm done. For me, it was several things. I was, at the beginning, I was hiding people in my house because we didn't know the consequences. We had no idea that if that person was arrested and forced

to say where they had been, I would be arrested. Maybe my children would be tortured in front of me. But you learn that later. And then by the time I was directly threatened, then I said, okay, I'm leaving. And my idea was that I was going to leave for a couple of months and then come back. So I went alone to Venezuela. And then a month later, my husband realized that I shouldn't go back. And so he left. He just closed the door, locked the entrance door of the house with everything it contained, and left to reunite with me in Venezuela. We never saw that house again.

And everything it contained was lost, which doesn't matter at all, because I don't remember what was in there. But I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed, definitely changed. How did you explain it to your children? I didn't, and that's my crime. We tried to protect the children from fear. We were living in fear.

And fear is a very pervasive thing that changes a society and changes the way people behave with each other and changes you inside. Something breaks inside you. And we didn't want our children to know about torture, about people disappearing, but they were aware. It was suddenly the teacher, two guys would come into the classroom and take the teacher away.

So the children would see it, but there was no explanation. And so when we left, the idea was, oh, we are going to Venezuela. That's what my husband said. We are going to Venezuela to see mommy. So it took a while for them to understand that we were staying, that we were refugees, and that probably we would not go back and they had to adapt. They had to get along with everybody else and just forget about what was behind.

After the break, Isabel tells me about the years she spent writing daily letters to her mother. We were very intimate and open, absolutely open in the letters. And when I went to visit, in a week we would feel like uncomfortable with each other because in person we didn't have the same openness that we had in writing. So you wrote your first novel, House of the Spirits, at the age of 39. And I think a lot of people have a feeling that at a certain point maybe it's too late for doing the thing that they want to do, they were meant to do, they've always dreamed of doing. When you got to that point where you started to write a letter to your grandfather that

then turned into this incredible novel, did you think, what am I doing here? This is not, I'm 39 years old, I'm not going to become a novelist at this age. I didn't think about age. I was feeling that my life was going nowhere. That I had lived for 39 years, almost 40 years, and I had nothing to show for it except my two children. And I was very bored, almost 40 years, and I had nothing to show for it except my two children. And I was very bored administering a school in a country that was not my own

country, feeling very alien in many ways, like a visitor, and a visitor in life, in a way. And so this letter that eventually turned into the book was like opening a vein and bleed out all that I was holding. And it was, I think it was an exercise in longing. I wanted to go back. I wanted to recover the country I had lost, my friends, my job, the life I had before. And in that attempt of recovering things that I had lost,

I started bringing in the anecdotes of my grandfather, my country, the Del Valle family. And they started, these people, it was a whole village that came to the kitchen counter where I was writing and populated the pages. I wasn't thinking, I didn't have a plan. I didn't have an outline of any kind. I didn't know how to edit anything.

To the point that when the book was finished and my husband, who was a civil engineer, read it, he said the only thing that he noticed was that the dates didn't match. And then you had a character in page 20 that was 18 years old and in page 300 was still 18 years old. What happened? This person didn't age? So he created a sort of map on the wall with the dates and the characters and what was

happening. And then I could organize it a little bit. But I knew nothing about what I was, I didn't have an idea. You say you had a feeling that your life was going nowhere. You had nothing to show for it other than your two children. I think if I felt that way, I would be overwhelmed. And I don't know that I would be able to start anything. I'm wondering if you could talk about that feeling a little bit more.

I was lost. I was bored. I think I was somehow depressed. Yeah. I didn't want that kind of life. But one thing has been always in my life, writing. Writing as a journalist, writing letters to my mother, writing to my grandfather, always writing. I think that my way of getting over things,

of understanding, of exploring my own of getting over things, of understanding, of exploring my own soul, my past, and also most important, of remembering, is writing. When my daughter died, that was the worst time in my whole life. And it was a very long time, also. It lasted more than a year. The only way that I could understand it and cope with it was writing. And I wrote a book.

It's been a little more than 30 years since you published that memoir that you just referred to, Paula, which is named after your daughter. It's about your life with her and the situation you found yourself in, where she was in a coma for quite a long time and then she eventually passed. I'm curious how your grief has changed after or evolved in the 30 years since you lost your daughter. involved in the 30 years since you lost your daughter? I feel my daughter like a companion. I have her photograph on her wedding day and my mother in a wedding dress when she put it on when she was 80.

I have these two photographs on the sink where I brush my teeth every morning and every night. So I say, good morning, good evening. They are always with me and I'm constantly in touch with Paula. I don't believe in ghosts. I don't see her as an apparition. And I don't believe that after I die, I will go through a tunnel of light and I will find her at the other end. But she lives in me. And there's a continuation. The grandmother, the mother, the daughter, the granddaughter. We're all linked in a chain. And we all live in each other in a way.

I get the impression, I think you've said this maybe before, that it's a book that still resonates greatly with people after all this time. I have written 30 books, and this is the one that has had in time the greatest response from the readers. Everybody has losses. It doesn't have to be a child.

It can be divorce. You lose your job. You lose your health, your parents. And people connect to the loss. No matter what loss it is. In this case, it's Paula. I get the most extraordinary letters. That's the kind of reward that very few writers get. I've been very, very lucky. Soterios Johnson Speaking of letters, your first novel, of course, started as a letter. Your memoir was a letter to your daughter. And I'm wondering if you could talk about the exercise of writing letters for you. It's just not something that people do anymore.

Unfortunately, it's a lost art. Language has shrunk to nothing because of the email. And we write like a telegram. We communicate with very few words and very poor imagery. But I grew up writing to my mother every single day because my mother was married to a diplomat. And when I was 16, we separated and we never lived together again. So we got the habit of writing to each other every single day. I would go through the day noticing what I would write to my mother in the evening. So I was present in the day taking mental notes of what I was living, I was seeing, I was thinking, I was dreaming

of the conversations, the encounters of everything so that I would have some material for the evening letter to my mother. Now, she died in 2018. And I tried for a while to keep on writing to her as if she was alive, but it didn't work. It was very artificial. But since then, I go through life like in a state of daydreaming. I don't notice anything anymore

because I don't have to write about it. It's sad. I have collected my mother's letters and my letters since 1987. They are separated in boxes by year. Some of the boxes have 600, 800 letters. So in total, we have calculated that I have around 24,000 letters. Can you imagine the volume of that? That's so many words to have exchanged with another person.

What did you learn about her from these letters? You know, it's very interesting because we were very intimate and open, absolutely open in the letters. And when I went to visit, in a week, we would feel like uncomfortable with each other because in person we didn't have the same openness that we had in writing. I don't know, things got in the way when we were together that didn't when we were writing. So I got to know my mother in ways that I don't know anybody else, not even my children.

Everything about her, her health, her dreams, her longings, her disappointments, her fights with my stepfather, her reconciliations, everything. We talked about money, sex, religion, you name it. She had a sort of Chilean sarcasm that I loved, and we connected through that too. But that works in a letter. And then in person can be offensive.

Do you feel like there's just something inherent in, as you say, the intimacy of letter writing, the access you have to someone's inner feelings that just cannot be replicated when you're with that person, for the most part. Well, maybe some people can. I cannot. You know what? I married Roger, I mean, we've been together for six years. This is your third husband.

My third husband. Not the last one, but the third. Got it. And so he, when we are separated physically, he writes to me the most tender and beautiful texts and I can do that too. But when we are in person, I just can't say it. It feels awkward. It feels awkward. In Spanish you say, for example,

tu eres la luz de mis ojos, you are the light of my eyes. In English it sounds awful. I can't say that in person to anybody, but I can write it. Is it true that Roger reached out to after hearing you on the radio by writing you a letter? Yeah, well, an email. An email, okay. Yeah, he heard me on NPR.

I was seeing him sitting down, taking out a piece of paper, writing out a letter, okay, an email. He sent me an email, sent an email to my foundation, saying that whatever, and very brief, and at the end it said that he was willing to go anywhere, anytime to meet me. But I answered politely because I receive many emails daily,

and I don't keep a correspondence with everybody. I just answer the first one. But he kept writing every morning and every evening for six months. I mean, really stubborn, the guy. And he didn't sound like the normal stalker. He sounded like a very transparent guy actually. So when I went to New York, I went to a conference for reproductive rights.

I met him and in two days he proposed and said that he would marry me eventually no matter what. But he was living in New York and I was living here. So he, at some point, sold his house, gave away everything he had, and moved to California with two bikes, his clothes, and some crystal glasses for some reason. I don't know why.

That's quite powerful. You convinced Abed to just get rid of his entire life and move across the country. I didn't ask him to do it, he did it. No, you didn't need to, clearly. But you know what is interesting, Gilberto, is that shortly before that, a couple of years before, I divorced from my second husband, Willie Gordon,

and I sold my house and gave away everything also because I moved to a very small house with my dog and I didn't need anything. So we both in a way started from scratch together, which was a very good thing to do. No baggage, at least material baggage. Yeah, no material baggage. I read an interview with you where you said that when you got a divorce in your early seventies, some people around you thought maybe there's a little crazy. How did that feel to you at that stage in your life?

Well, I was 74 years old. We had been together for 28 years. I had loved that man a lot. But you never know why love ends at some point. And it isn't sudden. It was a slow deterioration that took years and a lot of therapy to try to fix it until we realized we couldn't fix it.

And so we divorced and many people say, well, you've invested all these years. What's wrong? What is so bad that you can't be together? Nothing was really very bad, but I thought that it takes more courage to stay in a bad relationship than to start an ew alone. You really have to be very courageous to decide that you are going to spend the rest of your, of the few years you have with a man that doesn't love you and in a relationship that is not working.

It's much better to just be alone. So that's what I did. You grew up in Chile, lived your young adult life there, and then you've been in America for several decades. You said during a speech you gave in 2018 when you accepted an award from the National Book Foundation, I was in the audience that night,

you said, although I am critical of many things about this country, I am proud to be an American citizen. I'm wondering how your thoughts about your citizenship have changed if they have at all. They have not changed. Over the past year, I am really critical. I am disgusted at a lot of stuff that is happening today and I'm willing to stand and work to make this country what it should be. I want this country to be compassionate and open and generous and happy as it has always been, a beacon for the rest of the world.

Since 2016 I believe your foundation has worked with refugees, especially those along the southern border of the United States. Has the work that your foundation does, has it become more difficult in recent months? Yes, very difficult. And there is a lot of really cruel things happening at the border that most of the American public doesn't know about, doesn't know the extent or the brutality. And my foundation works with that. We work with women mostly and children, the most vulnerable people.

And it's very sad. And I don't know for how long we will be able to do this. What would stop you? What would get in your way? Well, of course, if the work is forbidden, if the people whom we help are targeted and their safety in any way is at risk, then that's as much as you can do. You have this humanitarian work that you're doing over here, and then over here, every day for eight, ten, however many hours you're in front of the keyboard and you're writing. Are those two things connected in your mind or do they exist in separate worlds? They exist separately because I don't do any social preaching, let's say,

or political activity in my writing. I write fiction. If I write a non-fiction book, then I feel that I am allowed to say whatever I want, to preach, to teach, to whatever. But if it's fiction, I just want to tell a story. And I don't want the storytelling to be tinted by ideology. I try to separate activism from literature.

And that's a conscious decision? Yes. Because I imagine given what you care about, what you're passionate about, the types of stories that you tell, that even if you're writing historical fiction or fiction set in the past, something will make its way in. There will be parallels,

and even if that's not your intention. Yeah, but I try to avoid it. Sometimes things filter between the lines. But the best way to ruin a good novel is by trying to deliver a message. You've said that you write sometimes as an act of nostalgia, clearly as an act of remembering. What, as you look to the future,

what do you think you want to remember now? Right now, I'm trying to be very present in the process of aging, because I think it's a fascinating time. And sort of taboo in this society where we live, people don't want to hear about aging. It's like ugly. And it can be, of course, but it can also be very liberating and a very wonderful journey. So, I am trying to keep a record of this right now.

But I'm very interested in what's happening in the world also. So I assume, I think that political events, like what we are living today in the United States, cannot be analyzed or explained or understood in the moment. You have to look at it with the distance of time. That gives you some perspective. And I know this because I remember

that I could not write about the military coup in Chile when it happened. I had all the information, but I couldn't write about it. I wrote The House of the Spirits many years later. So I think that I hope to have enough time to be able to see what we are living today with some perspective. That's Isabel Allende.

My name is Emilia Del Valle, we'll be out on May 16th. And you can find me every week over at the Book Review Podcast, where we talk about books new and old, and I speak with authors all the time. This conversation was produced by Wyatt Orm and Seth Kelly. It was edited by Annabel Bacon, Original Music, and mixing by Sophia Landman. Photography by Devin Yawken, our senior booker is Priya Matthew, our executive producer is

Allison Benedict. Special thanks to Roy Walsh, Renan Barelli, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Mazziello, Jake Silverstein, Paula Schumann, and Sam Dolnick. If you like what you're hearing, follow or subscribe to The Interview wherever you get your podcasts. To read or listen to any of our conversations, you can always go to nytimes.com slash the interview and you can email us anytime at theinterview at nytimes.com. Next week, David talks with writer Ocean Baum.

What I've been really interested in is this idea of kindness without hope. And what I saw working in the fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people were kind even when they know it won't matter. What is that? Where does that come from? I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the interview from the New York Times. you