Isabel Allende's First Novel Began as a Letter

Isabel Allende began writing her first novel on January 8, 1981. She started with a letter to her dying grandfather in Chile, intending to preserve his stories.

That letter quickly grew into something else entirely. Allende, writing in her kitchen after long shifts at a school, found an unprecedented sense of freedom. She felt no pressure because she was not trying to write a book. Her grandfather would never read it. This liberated her to embroider and change his tales. She has never recaptured that exact feeling of absolute creative liberty.

The Story Unfolds

Allende wrote for hours each night and on weekends. The saga of the Trueba-del Valle family emerged organically. Characters appeared, inspired largely by her own extravagant relatives and people she had known. The story reflected the broader political turmoil of Latin America. While Chile is never named in the novel, Allende states it is the main character. The atrocities in the book mirrored those in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Central America during a period of repressive governments and military coups.

By the end of the year, she had a stack of over five hundred pages on her kitchen counter.

A Precious Manuscript

That pile of paper was her sole manuscript. In an era before easy copying, it was irreplaceable. Allende carried the pages in a canvas bag everywhere, guarding them as jealously as she had her newborn children. She once left the bag at a hair salon. In a panic, she returned to find it had been thrown in a large outdoor trash container. Allende retrieved it herself. The manuscript was intact, mockingly so.

The Intimacy of Writing and Reading

Allende reflects that writing and reading are deeply intimate acts. In silence, she converses with her reader. They communicate and share across time and space. She proposes a story, and each reader interprets it differently. A novel, she believes, is reborn with every reading. Allende sees her books as living creatures that leave her to fulfill their own destinies in the world. With luck, they provoke imagination or move hearts.

These insights come from an excerpt of her book, Story Telling: A Writing Life. The original account was featured in Lit Hub's Craft of Writing newsletter.