South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Isabel Allende on feminism, TV series, love in pandemic
‘Women alone are very vulnerable, women together are invincible’
NEW YORK — Isabel Allende is not only the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author but also a self-declared and outspoken feminist. So it is not surprising that her most recent book, “The Soul of a Woman,” arrived in the United States during Women’s History Month, just days before the premiere of a miniseries about her life on HBO Max.
In her first nonfiction book in more than a decade, the Chilean author reviews her relationship with feminism, remembering those who marked her — from her mother, Panchita, and her daughter Paula to literary agent Carmen Balcells and authors Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood. She also reflects on the #MeToo movement and the coronavirus pandemic.
“The year of the pandemic has paralyzed everything, and much of what women had done was going out to the streets to gather and protest,” said Allende in an interview with The Associated Press via Zoom from her home in California. “Women alone are very vulnerable, women together are invincible . ... It’s not that I think that it has regressed or stopped. This is moving forward.”
The first 50 years of her life are dramatized in “Isabel: The Intimate Story of the Writer Isabel Allende,” a three-part biopic that premiered March 12 on HBO Max starring Chilean actress Daniela Ramirez.
Produced by Megamedia Chile and directed by Rodrigo Bazaes, the miniseries bookends the story with the death of her daughter, who died in 1992 at 29 while in a coma due to a porphyria crisis (as Allende wrote in her 1994 memoir “Paula”).
“It made me sob because it starts with Paula in the hospital and ends with Paula’s death. We saw it with my son (Nicolas) and we both had to stop because we were crying so hard with the first scene. But then it gets better in the sense that it is no longer so emotional for us,” she said, adding that she was extremely pleased and impressed with the result.
Allende starts a new book every Jan. 8. Last year, quarantine allowed her to finish not one but two: “The Soul of a Woman,” a Ballantine Books release, and an upcoming novel titled “Violeta” that begins with the 1918 pandemic (“which really began in Chile in 1920,” she points out) and ends with today’s pandemic. “It is the life of a woman during that time,” she says.
Allende recalled her beginnings as a feminist and also spoke about her experience as a 78-year-old “newlywed” in confinement. She married her third husband, New York lawyer Roger Cukras, in July 2019.
Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: You have said that you were bothered by injustices against women from an early age and that it was something you got to see in your own family. But when and how did you realize that you were a feminist?
A: Darling, there was no such a word back then! When I was a girl in Chile in the ’40s, in a conservative, Catholic, patriarchal family, my mother had been abandoned by her husband and we lived in my grandfather’s house. All men, my uncles and my grandfather. And my grandfather was the absolute patriarch. He was a very good man, I adored him, but he was the highest authority, he was like God. What my grandfather said was not questioned. I grew up with the feeling that my mother was in a situation of injustice, in a situation of inequality, of vulnerability. My mother lived in the same house and I suppose my grandfather paid for school and all that, but my mother never had money, she never had freedom. Being a separated woman at that time, in that society, my mother was very frowned upon; she had to take great care of her reputation, for which she was also very limited. And when did I come to realize that this anger that I felt had a name? It was not, I think, until adolescence because there were no references. And I couldn’t realize that there really was a movement, and that I could belong to that movement, until I was 20 at least.
Q: “The Soul of a Woman” is your first nonfiction book in more than a decade. What led you to write it now?
A: It wasn’t my idea. I gave a speech in Mexico City awhile ago and the speech was a viral phenomenon. The publishers in Spain thought they were going to publish it as a little book. I read it and said, “This thing is totally outdated,” because in a short time #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the protests of women in the street ... so much had happened that was not mentioned in the speech. I said, “No, this is useless.” Then I started to think about my own trajectory and how I have lived the movement because it has been almost simultaneous, you see? The women’s liberation movement is very old, but it really began with the pill in the 1960s, when women were able to control their fertility for the first time. That created a space that didn’t exist before, a space that my mother, of course, did not have — my mother was married for four years and had three children.
Q: How has the pandemic treated you?
A: Well, because what a writer needs is time, silence and solitude, and the pandemic has given me that. I’m a newlywed and, look, the pandemic has been a litmus test because it’s like a long honeymoon that never ends (laughs). But in this honeymoon we have learned a lot as a couple, as a family, that can be extrapolated to humanity: We are forced to live on a fragile planet, in a limited space that has to be sustainable, that we have to keep in order and clean, otherwise we will perish. That we need patience, tolerance, compassion, kindness.