A Pleasant Diversion: Isabel Allende on Writing
This is a pleasant diversion — the opportunity to hear author Isabel Allende talk about writing Island Beneath the Sea, a novel that captures the revolutionary history of Haiti as it became the world’s first black republic. “I wasn’t planning to write this book — I was planning to write about the pirates of the Caribbean — and that was before Johnny Depp,” Allende remarked with a wide grin at an author luncheon at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. In New Orleans at the time, Allende was researching the pirates and became captivated by their link to the slave revolt that led to the formation of the republic of Haiti in 1804.
“I spent four years researching the history,” she said. “All the historical facts in the book are true – it is fiction based on fact.” While Allende’s books often are published first in Spanish (she writes in Spanish), the hardcover edition of Island Beneath the Sea in English occurred last year, coincident with the massive earthquake in Haiti, focusing an unusual lens on the story. ”The people of Haiti have been betrayed by everyone throughout history,” she mused. And, not only everyone but everything, it would seem, including the dire forces of nature.
In answering questions about her process, Allende confessed that she “got very sick” while writing this book. “I don’t have a plan for a book. It sort of moves here and there. I’m told my getting sick is psychosomatic, but I was very sick for two years — I couldn’t sleep lying down. So now I know when I’m going to write, I’m going to get sick.”
A former journalist, Allende was 39 when she started her first book, the absorbing novel of magical realism, The House of Spirits. “It started as a letter…The things that have happened in my life happened by chance. In fact, all the plans I’ve made have never materialized. So if you are open to risk…” Her prodigious output is now 16 novels and nonfiction volumes, with the next about to be putblished in Spanish before its U.S. release in 2012. And she is quite a multi-tasker. While writing Island Beneath the Sea, she also worked on her memoir, The Sum of Our Days. That book, too, was unfolding in real time. “I write a letter to my mother every day, so I go into the closet for the letters my mother returns to me every year.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Allende speak; I had interviewed her in the late ’80s when I was I was editor of the “Personalities Page” in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine. She was one of about 400 celebrities I’d interviewed about their creative passion each week for the magazine page between 1986 and the early ’90s.
Now Allende lives in San Rafael, California, not far from Book Passage and is a generous participant in Marin County, lending her name and energy to artistic and humanitarian causes. One of those is her foundation supporting women and children, begun 16 years ago in honor of her daughter Paula, who died suddenly and tragically in 1992. The book Paula is a moving personal and family memoir. Gifts to the foundation go directly, she said, “to the organizations we support.”
