One of Latin America’s most prominent authors, Isabel Allende, was in San Diego on Monday discussing writing, aging, memory, refugees and more.
She spoke at the annual Author’s Luncheon by Words Alive, a San Diego nonprofit that promotes reading among children from low-income families.
Allende’s new book, The Japanese Lover, tells of a Polish refugee who falls in love with a Japanese gardener in San Francisco. The gardener is forced into an internment camp during World War II.
She said the idea for the book came to her during a conversation with a friend who mentioned that her elderly mother had a 40-year friendship with a male Japanese gardener.
“I said 'They were lovers!' And she said, ‘Why would you say that about my mother?’ And I said, well, because if I had had a male friend for 40 years, I would have slept with him, of course,” Allende said.
The protagonist of her new book is 80-year-old Alma Belasco, who has recently moved into a nursing home. Allende said she was inspired to explore the topic of aging because her father is 100 and her mother is 95. Allende herself is 73.
“It’s terrifying, mostly because we live in a culture that doesn’t accept (aging),” she said. “In the Western world, we focus and value success, productivity, youth and beauty.”
She said she wanted to know if it was possible to fall in love later in life, and came to the conclusion, through her characters, that it is.
Allende told moderator Seth Lerer, former dean of arts and humanities at UC San Diego, that if he thinks he is going to become a wiser person with age, he’s wrong. She said people's habits, good or bad, metastasize over time.
“You will be more of what you already are,” she said.
Allende said she also wanted to explore the topic of displacement in her new book because she has always lived as a foreigner. She was a political refugee in Venezuela after the 1973 military coup in Chile and is now an immigrant in San Francisco.
She said the refugee crisis in Europe and certain aspects of the U.S. immigration debate are emblematic of how nations have always responded to immigrants.
“They are never welcome. But once they integrate, they bring to the country the best they have. And the country is enriched by it. So instead of refusing immigrants we have to welcome them,” she said in an interview with KPBS.
She said the influx of refugees in Europe has placed the reality of political asylum into the global spotlight, although there have always been refugees.
“The refugee situation in Europe is called a crisis because it’s happening in Europe. But when it happened in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, masses of people moving away from their homeland, it wasn’t a crisis, they were just refugees,” she said. “Now it’s very present because Europeans are suffering it for the first time.”
Allende noted that the success of her books in translation is rooted in the universality of her characters and their stories as human beings, regardless of their ethnicity.
“It’s about people, it’s not about engaging with the self-absorbed process of writing,” she said.
Allende added that she thinks the translations are often better than her original Spanish-language versions.
Her new book also explores the theme of memory, how it can recreate life and how it resembles invention. One of the characters in The Japanese Lover is writing a family memoir.
“In the brain, memory is the same process as imagination,” she said. “You can make your life happy or not in memory. You choose what to remember and how to remember.”
Allende said the two memoirs she has written, Paula and The Sum Of Our Days, are not objective because she chose what to emphasize and what to omit, as well as which adjectives to describe a situation.
“I could give it a very brilliant tone or a very dark tone. So it’s my choice of how I will remember my life,” she said. “In those two memoirs, I have created a legendary life for myself … it is highlighted in technicolor instead of being all the grays in between, that are most of our lives.”
She said she writes letters to her mother every day so that she can remember her life.
“If I write that day, it is saved,” she said. “If I don’t write that day, it is lost.”
Allende says she wanted to participate in the Words Alive luncheon because the nonprofit’s mission aligns with the mission of the Isabel Allende Foundation, which empowers marginalized women in part through education.
She concluded that writing has, for her, a sort of healing power.
“When my daughter died, I felt that I was in a void, that there was no life after that,” she said. “And by writing a book, the memoir called Paula, I could sort of contain the sorrow within certain limits — the limits of the book. The limits of those pages, of those words that I had chosen to describe the event and my feelings. And by doing that, I could see that outside those boundaries there was life.”
Allende said 2015 has been a particularly difficult year, in part because her marriage of 27 years came to an end.
“I’ve been through a very bad year, this has been a year of real losses,” she said. “I’m just waiting for January 8 — I start all my books on January 8 — to sit down and exorcise this damn year.”
