Isabel Allende on love, death, magic realism and her new book, My Name is Emilia Del Valle

Australia Broadcast Center

06-05-2025

International bestselling writer Isabel Allende is late to our interview, but only by a few minutes.
When the 82-year-old Chilean-American novelist appears on the video call, she has her phone to her ear and is thanking her son for helping her figure out the meeting pin.
The world's most widely read Spanish-language author — whose books have
I have to fight the urge to thank Allende for existing.
This is the woman whose debut novel was The House of the Spirits — the 1982 bestseller that started as a letter to her grandfather and evolved into a work of historical fiction that spans generations.
It's a stunning novel that chronicles the social and political unrest in an unnamed Latin American country, celebrates strong, multidimensional women, and melds the fantastical with the ordinary.
The book was also rooted in Allende's personal experiences: in 1973, the author was forced to flee Chile after her father's cousin, then-President Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a military coup.
Since The House of the Spirits, she's published 27 more books (both fiction and memoir),
And now she has a new book.
My Name is Emilia Del Valle
Allende's latest work is another piece of historical fiction following a strong woman; she says she keeps returning to the genre because the more she learns about the past, the more she understands the present — and the less upset she feels.
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I have lived long enough to know that everything passes as cycles, and everything passes.
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My Name is Emilia Del Valle is everything longtime fans look for in an Allende book.
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Supplied: Bloomsbury Publishing
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And she always writes strong women because she simply doesn't "know any woman who is weak or submissive".
"The ones who are victimised are not victims; they get up and they stand on their feet sooner or later."
The premise of My Name is Emilia Del Valle had been in her mind for a long time.
Set between the United States and Chile in the late 1800s, it's a coming-of-age novel, a love story, and a tale of the terror and tragedy of war — with parallels to the military coup that up-ended Allende's life.
"In both cases, there was a progressive president who had big opposition from the conservatives, and in the first case, in 1891, the armed forces divided and there was a civil war," Allende explains.
"In 1973, all the armed forces united against the government, so that became a dictatorship that lasted 17 years. In both cases, the president [killed himself] instead of going into exile.
"Those parallels were really interesting for me."
Wanting to tell the story as objectively as possible, Allende devised protagonist Emilia Del Valle, a driven young woman with many similarities to Allende.
Emilia never knew her Chilean aristocrat father or his birth country, instead growing up in the poor Mission District of San Francisco with her mother and beloved stepfather.
Despite the societal expectations of the era, marriage and motherhood hold no allure for Emilia, who instead dreams of becoming a writer.
Allende says My Name is Emilia Del Valle took her a year to write, and longer to research.
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Supplied: Lori Barra
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Using a man's name, she begins penning dime novels packed with action and gore, about "bad women" who reject society's rules.
When that too grows dull, she starts writing newspaper chronicles for the local Daily Examiner, under that same pseudonym, and is eventually sent to Chile to cover the impending civil war — finally, as Emilia Del Valle.
Towards the end of the book, this story, ostensibly one of war and love, takes on the otherworldly feel Allende's writing is synonymous with.
Flashes of magic realism — supernatural happenings that are presented as ordinary occurrences, with minimal explanation — blur the line between realistic fiction and fantasy.
To Allende, magical realism is not a literary device
When asked why magic realism is integral to so many of her stories, Allende says: "Because I believe the world is a very mysterious place.
"I accept that there are many unexplainable things that have happened in my life, and I can write about that in a very natural way — it's not a literary device."
One such instance featured in Allende's 1994 memoir, Paula, a celebration of her daughter Paula Frías Allende's life and a meditation on dying and grief. In it, Allende wrote of finding a letter her daughter penned before she fell into a porphyria-induced coma in her late 20s, in which Paula appeared to have foreseen her untimely death.
Allende's 1994 memoir, written in honour of her daughter Paula (pictured), has been a source of strength for people in the throes of grief since it was published three decades ago.
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Allende thinks people often attribute the popularity of magical realism in Latin American storytelling to the idea that "Latin America is a particularly superstitious place".
But she disagrees with this categorisation.
"That idea that reason is what moves the world, science, mathematics, and that's it, is a very limited way of thinking, because there are many other ways of perceiving reality, like any poet can tell you.
"I live in the United States [where] people believe in crystals, in horoscopes, psychics, astrologers … They don't call it magic realism here, it's something else, it's new-age or whatever — but it's the same thing.
"Writers of colour have always had these elements, like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and so many others."
She says it's "a very European, white way of thinking" and white American writers have long dominated Western literature and fostered a negative perception of magical realism.
"When you say the word 'literature', you immediately assume it was written by a white man, and if somebody else has written it, you add an adjective. You say 'female writer'. You say 'young adult literature', 'African American literature' — always an adjective, and the adjective diminishes it. The real literature? White men wrote it.
"[But] that is changing because, of course, the world is changing … I think there is much more acceptance [of different voices] than before."
Allende, pictured in 1995 with her then-new book, Paula.
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Getty Images: Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe
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There's a scene in My Name is Emilia Del Valle where Allende's protagonist is condemned to death and speaks of detaching from her body and floating in midair, "looking from above with a certain curiosity at the miserable woman lying on the floor". She then experiences visions of her loved ones, who come to say goodbye.
"I imagine that can happen," Allende says.
The writer believes life's extremes force us to consider things we never would otherwise.
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I am not a religious person at all. I hate all kinds of organised religion. However, when my daughter was dying — for a year she was in a coma — it was a year of desperate prayer, because there was nothing else.
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I tell her I know what she means. A little over a year ago, my best friend died a very similar death to Paula, just before her 29th birthday.
"Ay — exactly my daughter's age," Allende exclaims.
I wouldn't consider myself religious either, but I too succumbed at the end to desperate prayer and the search for meaning in the things I had no explanations for — things we'd call "magic realism" if they were found in the pages of a book.
"Let me show you…" Allende begins, then reaches around her computer for a framed black-and-white portrait of Paula.
"This is my daughter in October 1991, the year before she died," she says, brandishing the image with a mother's fierce pride.
Allende's next book is a memoir about aging and love, which the author found again in her 70s with New York lawyer Roger Cukras.
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Supplied: Lori Barra
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As the end of our interview approaches, Allende tells me she has been thinking about death more than ever, now that she is so "very close" to it.
"Not in a morbid way, but in a very realistic way. It's checking in. This is going to happen."
Aging will be the focus of her next book, which she's currently writing. It will also explore the end of her second marriage, the time she spent single, and finding love once more; at 74, Allende married her third husband, New York lawyer Roger Cukras.
She says the love story at the heart of her upcoming memoir wouldn't be original in the slightest — were it not for the fact "it happened at a very old age".
"When other people [my age] are only thinking of cancer and death, I'm also thinking of romance," Allende laughs.
is out now.