The House of the Spirits Started Out as a Letter to Allende’s Grandfather

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On January 8, 1981, I started writing a letter to my grandfather, who was dying in Chile. My original idea was to let him know that I remembered all the stories he’d told me. They would not be forgotten when he was gone. The letter kept getting longer and I eventually realized it was not a letter, but something else. It would become my first book, The House of the Spirits.
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If I had given myself the task of writing a novel, probably I never would have gone beyond the first few sentences, but as it was just a letter, like so many letters I had written to my mother and other people, I wrote without any expectations. By the second page it was obvious that it was not a normal letter, it had the tone of a soap opera. My grandfather would not live to receive it, but that did not discourage me, quite the opposite, it gave me wings. I could write anything I wanted without fear of offending him. I could embroider his stories and change them. Never again have I had that incredible feeling of absolute freedom to write.
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At that time, I worked long shifts at the school, twelve hours a day. I had very little free time, but unbound enthusiasm. I would come home each night and sit in my kitchen typing away. As I recalled events from the past, the story took shape and the characters appeared one by one, almost all of them inspired by my extravagant relatives and people I had known. I didn’t get scared by the magnitude of the endeavor. Page after page the story was emerging.
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I continued writing for several hours every night and on the weekends. The saga of the Trueba–del Valle family unfolded organically, without any effort. Their micro story reflected the macro story of the country. Chile is never mentioned in the novel, but it is the main character. In those years many Latin American countries had repressive governments, military coups, dictatorships, and undeclared wars against the poor and the indigenous population, which were backed by the CIA in the context of the Cold War. The atrocities committed in Chile were similar to those in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Central America, where leftist movements and guerrillas were squashed with incredible brutality. My novel could have taken place anywhere on our tormented continent.

I fulfilled my duties at the school like a sleepwalker, my mind fully occupied by the story. When finally I could go back to writing in the evening, the words would flow as if dictated by a voice from the depth of my memory. By the end of the year, I had over five hundred pages on the kitchen counter.

That pile of paper was something I could not name. It looked like a manuscript. Only one copy existed, and it wasn’t so easy to make more copies in those days. During that year I carried those pages in a canvas bag on my shoulder, I never parted from them, just as I had carried my newborn babies: jealously. I remember that once, I left the bag at the hair salon and panicked. By the time I could go back to fetch it, they had thrown it in the trash, so I had to get into the large container in the street to retrieve it. There it was, intact, mocking me.

Since that first experience in the kitchen in Caracas, much more has happened in my life, and I have written many books. Writing and reading are very intimate experiences. In silence and in private I converse with my reader; we communicate, we share, we shake hands across time and space. I propose something and each reader interprets it differently. A novel is reborn each time someone reads it. I believe that my books don’t belong to me, they are living creatures that go out into the world to fulfill their destinies. With any luck, they might provoke the imagination of some readers or move their hearts.

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Excerpted from Story Telling: A Writing Life by Isabel Allende. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.