Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Interview

Isabel Allende

talks to Daneet Steffens

Issue 39 ◊ Oct/Nov/Dec 2008

Isabel Allende has always had a flair for the dramatic: when she first read Shakespeare, Allende, aged nine and fascinated by the stories, would draw figures of the characters, glue each one to a matchstick and move them around so she could visualise the play, directing the makeshift actors through the Bard’s intricate plotlines. On BBC Radio 4 this spring, 57 years later, a refreshingly non-bashful Allende announced that ‘all the really important things in my life I do in Spanish: writing, praying, scolding my grandchildren, making love – I would feel ridiculous panting in English!’ She also makes no bones about the fact that she, happily married to American lawyer Willie Gordon for more than 20 years, lusts cheerfully after Antonio Banderas (‘I dream of devouring him naked,’ she told The Observer, ‘covered in guacamole.’).

Unsurprisingly, Allende plays many successful roles: she is an adoring grandmother who has sat through Tarzan and Mulan umpteen times; she’s a fiercely passionate family woman who tests prospective daughters-in-law by travelling with them into the depths of the Amazon jungle; she’s a devoted daughter who has written a letter to her mother every day that they’ve been apart; she’s a committed friend who basks in the support of her intimate circle of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder; and she’s an impeccable hostess who clasps your hand in warm greeting at the door, and keeps a hold of it as she leads you to her idyllic garden patio and a delicious spicy chicken salad lunch.

And, by the by, Allende also happens to be an internationally bestselling author whose works are translated into 35 languages. In a glittering pantheon of Latin American magic realist writers, she is a shining female star, surrounded by such luminaries as Jorge Amado, Julio Cortázar Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Luis Borges.
Having already made her global mark with such enchanting and mesmerising novels as The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows and Eva Luna in the 80s, Allende gained an even wider audience with 1995’s Paula, a singularly rich, explosively popular, utterly compelling letter-cum-memoir, written to her daughter, Paula, as she lay in a coma.

ISABEL ALLENDE was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, but has also lived variously in Chile, Bolivia, Lebanon, Belgium and Venezuela.

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