Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
[1] Isabel Allende has been called “a literary legend”, a “cultural bridge builder”, and one of the most influential Latin American women leaders, but she is also like a good friend with whom you take off your shoes, curl up on the sofa, and figure out life together.
[2] I first met Isabel Allende over twenty years ago in Los Angeles when she was giving a reading.I was involved with PEN, who may have been co-sponsoring the program — I no longer remember — but I remember attending a powerful evening with my colleagues.For the past months I’ve been absorbed in continuing my reading of Isabel Allende, and I can confirm that I am one of her good friends — though she may not know this.But as a reader, I have the feeling I am not alone in this club, or tribe, because if you immerse yourself in her fiction and memoirs, you not only feel you know her from her easy and confidential prose, but you think she surely knows you because of her insights into life.And even if she doesn’t, you feel she might want to know you and then let you move into the tribe of people she collects around her.
[3] This intimacy she achieves is in part responsible, I’m sure, for her wide readership.Reading her books is like sitting and having coffee with friends at a kitchen table when one of them asks, “You want to hear a story? Let me tell you what happened...” And off you go into her world.
[4] In her memoir Sum of Our Days, Isabel tells the reader this is in part what her life is like with her friends, including The Sisters of Disorder, who follow each other’s trials and pray for each other and share their varied views of a larger spiritual life.In her writing she weaves the strands of spiritual quest, history, love, politics, and individual liberation into a body of work that informs and entertains and provokes thought.
[5] The intimate relationship Allende conveys in her writing belies the strict discipline she embodies as a writer who writes six days a week, ten hours a day when she is at work on a book.She has published over eighteen books — novels, short story collections, memoirs, and young adult novels, as well as plays and a body of articles as a journalist.Three of her books have been made into movies.She has won numerous awards, including the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit, the first woman to win; she’s been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; she’s been awarded honorary doctorates and has also taught writing in universities, including the University of California at Berkeley.Her work has been translated into over twenty-eight languages and sold over fifty-six million copies.