‘I still believe that marriage is a bad deal for women’
Novelist Isabel Allende talks to Celia Walden about sexist criticism, rewriting Barbara Cartland and finding love again in her 70s
‘I still believe that marriage is a bad deal for women today. Things have changed – but not that much’
‘I would never feel hatred towards anybody. It is a burden and the person you hate is often unaware of it’
As a child growing up in Chile, Isabel Allende remembers her grandfather declaring that “all men should get married but no woman should”. “Because he believed marriage was a terrible deal for women,” explains the 77-year-old author of international bestsellers such as The House of Spirits, Inés of My Soul and Paula. “And things have changed, but not that much. I still think that in general the stability, happiness and comfort of the family depends on the mother, and that she has to sacrifice herself for the well-being of the family. I still believe that marriage is a bad deal for women today.”
I let this lie a moment. After all it’s early morning in San Rafael, northern California – Allende’s home since 1989 – and early on in my interview with the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author: a woman whose 24 books have sold more than 74million copies worldwide. Besides which, Allende isn’t easy to challenge. She’s forthright, feisty and fast talking, and it’s only on my second try that I manage to interject: surely marriage can’t be that bad if she’s done it three times? The last being four months ago?
Allende lets out a peal of laughter. “I know I said I’d never marry again. I said: no, no, no. But my first marriage [at 19, to Miguel Frias, the father of her two children, Nicolás and Paula] lasted 29 years, and my second [to Californian attorney Willie Gordon], 28. Although really both of those marriages ended by their 20th year – and the rest of the time was spent trying to fix them. Anyway this time I don’t have 20 years, so this will be my last marriage.”
Allende’s new husband will be glad to hear it. Widowed lawyer Roger Cukras fell in love with Allende when he heard her talking on the radio five years ago. “He started writing to me every morning and evening for five months,” Allende tells me. “Then I went to New York to meet him and he immediately proposed. I said: ‘You’re absolutely crazy, I don’t even know you.’ And we had a long-distance relationship until he sold his house, gave away everything he owned, and came to live with me. A year later, we got married.”
Late in life love and the unpredictability of love are two key themes in Allende’s new book, A Long Petal of the Sea. “Because I wanted to portray the kind of love that doesn’t usually get portrayed in books.” And because people kept asking Allende what it was like to fall in love at her age. “I’d tell them: it’s the same as being in love at 20, but with a sense of urgency. So you don’t have time for jealousy or pettiness; you just focus on the fact that you can sit out on the deck watching the sunset together and fall asleep holding hands every night.” Not such a terrible deal then? Meekly, she concedes: “I am very happy.”
Inspired by the real-life exile of 2,200 Spaniards to Chile on Sswinnipeg after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, A
Long Petal of the Sea tells the story of a fictional young doctor, Victor Dalmau, and his sister-in-law, Roser Bruguera, as they try to carve out new lives for themselves in a country that, far from being the safe haven they imagined, descends into the same violence and repression they fled.
The tale is peppered with autobiographical detail – Allende was forced to flee to Venezuela when her father’s cousin, President Salvador Allende, was toppled by Pinochet’s bloody military coup. And I’m curious to know whether the Lima-born daughter of a secretary at the Chilean Embassy still feels hatred for the dictator who went on to rule Chile for 17 years. “No.” She sounds surprised. “I don’t feel hatred towards anybody, because it’s a burden that you carry, and usually the person that you hate is not even aware of it. So in the end it’s just suffering.”
Those who have experienced true suffering often have a greater capacity for joy. That is certainly true of Allende, who says simply: “I would not be a writer today without having been exiled. I wrote [debut novel] The House of Spirits as an exercise in memory about that time.”
When her daughter Paula died at 29 in 1992 after falling into a porphyria-induced coma from which she never recovered, Allende turned the letter she began writing to her daughter at her bedside into a memoir that touched the hearts of millions. And although talking about Paula still renders Allende mute with emotion, she was able to find joy in the knowledge “that in Spain for a couple of years afterwards Paula was the most popular girl’s name”.
The success of The House of Spirits – which became an instant worldwide bestseller in 1982 – bred a superstition in Allende, and she starts every new book on the same date she started writing the famous family saga: January 8. I say I’m surprised that any writer as accomplished and adored as she needs that to boost her. “Oh success is something that happens in the outer circle. I live in this little world that is the Victorian house in which I write, my family and my dogs.” Yes, she is recognised in airports – “I get asked for selfies all the time and oh God: I look like a frog!” – but neither that nor the number of books she has sold “diminishes the effort needed to write the next story. It’s a constant struggle, and there’s always that terror that the muse will betray me.”
With a brand of inverted snobbery that’s particular to the art and literary worlds, Allende has been scoffed at for her success – proof, jealous detractors feel, that she’s not a “real” writer. Isn’t much of that not just down to her popularity but her sex? “Yes! As a woman writer you get judged in a much harsher way than any man. But that’s something you have to put up with. I get a lot of positive things too, and I don’t want to sit on my laurels. But oh, the older white men at cocktail parties who – when I tell them what I do – say: ‘I don’t read books written by women’.” And I can actually hear the serenity draining out of her and the rage setting in. “They say this to my face!” Relaxing into laughter again Allende tells me how adept she’s become at flinging back: “I totally understand. I don’t read books written by men either.”
Allende comes from a generation of women who saw the point of feminism before the waves and the hashtags muddied its objectives. For her, there is ultimately only one: “To destroy the patriarchy. And for that we need a lot of young foot-soldiers, and for developed countries not to become complacent. Because it means changing the fundamental structure of the world in which we live.”
This is a woman who was sacked from a job translating romance novels by writers such as Barbara Cartland after it was discovered that she had been changing the heroines’ dialogue to make them sound more intelligent. “They were so dumb! So dumb! I mean they all had big breasts and green eyes, but for God’s sake! So I changed a few things to make them sound better… and I changed a few endings too.” Wait – she changed the endings? “Well I always hated those fairy tales where the women were victims as a child. And, thankfully, now there are so many girls and women in literature who are portrayed as powerful, independent and challenging.”
Allende has been changing the narrative ever since. Her female protagonists aren’t just strong but believable, and in 1996 she set up the Isabel Allende Foundation in homage to her daughter Paula, “to invest in the power of women and girls”. With birth control one of the foundation’s areas of emphasis, Allende is still in shock at the rise of anti-abortion legislation in the US. “Look at me: I’m living in the US in 2020, where if they could eliminate the right for a woman to have control over her own body, they would.”
So “disgusted” is she by Donald Trump that Allende has even considered exile again. “But where would I go? I have my foundation, work, family, husband and dogs here. I’m willing to get started in another place if I can take it all with me. And maybe it will be necessary to do that at some point, but I’m hopeful.”
Having witnessed the ebb and flow of repression and freedom she describes in A Long Petal of the Sea,
Allende is sure that “the pendulum will continue to swing from one way to the other. But I know that the curve is towards more democracy and more inclusion. I was born during the Second World War, at the time of the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and genocides. There was no UN or Declaration of Human Rights. There were no rights for the children working in factories.
“So when I sit back and look at all of it, I can see that the curve is towards a better world.”