Isabel Allende's home library holds what matters most

Washington Post

12-05-2025

Allende has kept roughly 24,000 of these letters, plus printouts of the email messages. They are housed in a garage behind her office, an organized repository where she also has shelf after shelf of first and translated editions of her novels. The correspondence is stored in file boxes, neatly labeled and stacked. Allende said she rarely opens the boxes, but with a little prodding she agreed to have them photographed, as long as I didn't reveal their contents. (In an interview on Julia Louis Dreyfus's podcast, Allende said her mother was very open and discussed, among other subjects, money, relationships and sex.)
'Oh, it's such a treasure,' she said as she pulled a box from the shelf at random, carefully opened it and took out a letter from 1987, when she moved to California. At the time, Allende didn't have a computer or typewriter, so wrote by hand, on onionskin paper. Her mother often wrote by hand as well, and Allende was proud to note that her mother 'could write six pages by hand in perfect, poetic, beautiful Spanish without any corrections.'
For Allende, this correspondence is more than a sentimental record of a relationship; it is also a primary source. 'Right now I'm writing a memoir, and I realized that I have forgotten 90 percent of what happened, and the 10 percent I remember didn't happen that way,' she confessed. The letter boxes hold the truth. 'For example, I thought that when I broke up and divorced my [second] husband, Willie, it was just a clean cut and it was just so easy. That's how I remember it. But it wasn't like that — at all. I didn't let go immediately. I would bring him food, I would buy his groceries, I would take care of his dog. I didn't cut it off, in cold blood, as I thought I had. … I look back and say, what was I thinking, I was divorcing him!'