![]() ![]() I was feeling all those feelings, but I had not expressed them, I did not know how to articulate them, until I read that book.ĪP: “The Soul of a Woman” is your first nonfiction book in more than a decade. 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.ĪP: And did you feel liberated or accompanied in any way? How do you remember it?Īllende: I remember when I read “The Female Eunuch” (1970) by Germaine Greer, which was a book with humor, with intelligence, with a way of saying things that was so direct and so obvious. 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. ![]() 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. 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. I grew up with the feeling that my mother was in a situation of injustice, in a situation of inequality, of vulnerability. ![]() What my grandfather said was not questioned. He was a very good man, I adored him, but he was the highest authority, he was like God. And my grandfather was the absolute patriarch. But when and how did you realize that you were a feminist?Īllende: 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. 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 deep coma due to a porphyria crisis (as Allende wrote in her 1994 memoir “Paula”).Īnswers have been edited for brevity and clarity.ĪP: 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. The first 50 years of her life are dramatized in “Isabel: The Intimate Story of the Writer Isabel Allende,” a three-part biopic premiering Friday on HBO Max and starring Chilean actress Daniela Ramírez. It’s not that I think that it has regressed or stopped. “Women alone are very vulnerable, women together are invincible. “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 a recent interview with The Associated Press via Zoom from her home in California. She also reflects on the #MeToo movement, the recent social unrest in Chile and the global pandemic. In her first nonfiction book in more than a decade, the Chilean author reviews her relationship with feminism from her childhood to the present, 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. ![]() 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. Isabel Allende is not only the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author but also a self-declared and outspoken feminist. ![]()
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