Isabel Allende’s books have been translated into more than 42 languages and sold some 75m copies globally. Her career spans fiction and nonfiction, and she’s also created the Isabel Allende Foundation in memory of her daughter (who died in 1992), working to empower women and girls around the world. Her new novel, Violeta, spans 100 years and recounts the turbulent life and times of its South American heroine. Allende, 79, who was born in Peru and raised in Chile, spoke from the study of her home in California, where she writes daily.
How did Violeta begin?
The idea started when my mother died, right before the current pandemic hit. She was born in 1920 when the influenza pandemic reached Latin America, so it was almost natural to have the two bookends of the novel be pandemics. When I write, I don’t have a plan and I don’t have a message – I just want people to come with me, to let me tell them a story.
Is its eponymous heroine based on your mother?
Violeta is born in my mother’s social class, in the same time, in a place that many readers will identify as Chile. My mother was like her in the sense that she was beautiful, talented, visionary, but my mother was dependent. Violeta is someone who can make a living, and that makes such a huge difference. I’ve always said that there’s no feminism if you cannot support yourself and your children, because if you depend, then somebody else gives the orders.
Violeta is an epistolary novel, and your debut, The House of Spirits, sprang from a letter to your grandfather. Are you a great letter-writer?
I used to write to my mum, and she would write to me, every single day for decades. My son hired a company to digitise the letters, and they calculated that there are about 24,000. Everything is there, my mother’s whole life, and also my life. But now that I don’t have my mum, I don’t have a daily record of the life I have lived each day, and I realise that my days go very fast.
How have you found the pandemic?
I have been able to do a lot. In two years, I have published a feminist nonfiction book [The Soul of a Woman], I wrote Violeta, and then I wrote another novel about refugees that is being translated and published in 2023 probably. I have three things that all writers want: silence, solitude and time. But because of the work my foundation does with people at risk, I’ve been very aware that there is despair and violence and poverty. The first to lose their jobs were women, migrants.
You say in The Soul of a Woman that you were a feminist even before you knew the word.
I was aware very young that it was not to my advantage to be born a female, but also I was very aware of social injustice. I was furious because the world was not fair.
Does injustice still make you as irate?
Of course! I have the same rage I had then. I try to be as calm as possible and to meditate – it doesn’t work at all.
What is the feminist movement’s biggest unfinished task?
The main unfinished task is to replace the patriarchy. We are chipping away pieces – too slowly in my opinion, because I won’t see it, but it will happen.
How do you feel about the recent election in Chile?
Happy. The new president says all the things I want to hear about inclusion, diversity, justice. He’s 35 years old – he could be my grandson, and that is fantastic because it’s a new generation taking over finally.
What is it like to live largely in English and write in Spanish?
You know, I find that I forget how to talk in Spanish, because there are certain things that I only say in English. I can write nonfiction in English, but fiction, no, because fiction flows in a very organic way. It happens more in the belly than in the brain.
What is the main difference between love off the page and on?
In real life, all the inconveniences are sometimes greater than the conveniences. If you marry so late in life, as I’ve done, there is a lot of baggage that one carries around, but also a sense of urgency which makes the relationship, and every day, very precious.
Your recent marriage is your third. Did you expect that?
Do you think that anybody expects to marry at 77? No! But then this man heard me on the radio and fell in love with me. The only reason we got married is because for him it was really important. The last straw was when his granddaughter, who was seven years old at the time, went to the librarian at school and said “Have you heard of Isabel Allende?” And the librarian said: “Yes, yes, I’ve read some of her books.” There was a pause, and then Anna said: “She’s sleeping with my grandfather.”
Tell me about the decision to start writing all your books on 8 January…
It was a superstition in the beginning but then my life got very complicated and now it’s discipline. I burn some sage, light my candles and spend my day with the door closed. Usually when I get out people have sent flowers and emails and boxes of orange peel covered with dark chocolate. That gives me strength and joy.
What books are on your bedside table?
I am reading in print Anthony Doerr’s book Cloud Cuckoo Land. I’m listening on audio to Alice Hoffman’s The Marriage of Opposites. And then I have in my Kindle a book that I should have read a couple of years ago called The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason. It’s a war story and I don’t like war stories but this one is extraordinary.
How do you organise your books?
I don’t. I give them away.
Every book?
The only book that I have kept is the first gift that my stepfather gave me when I was 10 years old, The Complete Works of Shakespeare. I read it like a story and have had it ever since.
Is there a classic you’re ashamed of not having read?
Probably The Brothers Karamazov. I got bored.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
I belong to a generation where there was no television, the radio was forbidden by my grandfather because he said it had vulgar ideas, and we never went to the movies, so I was always a very good reader. In my teenage years, when I was so lonely and so enraged, my way of escaping from everything and myself was reading.
Has any title in particular stuck with you?
I remember vividly when I was around 13 and we were living in Lebanon. Girls didn’t go anywhere – school and home, that was it. To give you an idea, I heard about Elvis Presley when he was already fat, so I skipped all that rock’n’roll and everything else. But my stepfather had an armoire that he kept locked because there he had whisky, chocolates, and I think Playboy. My brothers and I would open it; my brothers would eat whole layers of chocolates and I would go directly to four volumes of One Thousand and One Nights, kept there because it was supposed to be erotic. It was erotic, but I didn’t get it because everything was a metaphor and I didn’t know the basics. But I enjoyed so much that forbidden reading in the armoire – one day I will have to write about it.
Violeta by Isabel Allende (translated by Frances Riddle) is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
