Word: paulas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Paula (Harper Collins; 330 pages; $24) the memoir Allende began on yellow pads as she sat in the hospital, is written as an anguished letter to her daughter, who suffered from porphyria--a metabolic disorder that is rarely fatal. "They told me she would wake up in a week or two," the writer says. But months passed at Paula's bedside before Allende learned that a hospital mishap had caused irreversible brain damage. "It was destiny--and it was bad luck. After they told me, I went on writing because I could not stop. I could not let anger destroy...
...book, as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as the chronicle of Paula's death, is a best seller in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. It has brought a new audience to the author, 52, who wrote her first novel, The House of the Spirits, at 40, when she was an exile in Venezuela after the murder of her cousin, former Chilean President Salvador Allende. That novel, in the magical realist style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was made into a 1994 film with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Altogether, Allende's four novels and a short-story...
...shingled cottage in Sausalito a block from San Francisco Bay, Allende surrounds herself with mementos: Paula's baby shoes, encased in copper; photographs of her, framed in silver; the earthen jar that contains Paula's ashes; and a letter Paula wrote during her honeymoon, foreseeing her own death. Petite and intense, Allende pours mango tea by a vase of wildflowers in the sunlit room. "All my books come from deep emotion," she says. "They are not born in my mind, they gestate in my womb." Her eyes welling with tears, she spreads across the table the handcrafted cards she uses...
Allende's life story, teeming with picaresque characters and improbable adventures, reads like her novels. In Paula she weaves it, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes abruptly, between graphic passages on her daughter's illness, Allende's own despair, and her metaphysical meditations on the life of the spirit. If the line between fact and fiction seems to blur, Allende explains, "magical realism is not a literary device; it's how I live." Growing up in Santiago, she remembers the great aunt "who at the end of her life began to sprout the wings of a saint," and the clairvoyant grandmother who, Allende...
...emotionally isolated exile in Venezuela. Eventually her marriage fell apart, just as her literary career took off. In 1988, on a book tour in California, she fell in love "at first sight" with, and married, an American lawyer, William Gordon. It was to their house that she brought Paula, in the final months of her coma, so she could die at home...