52 Women I Admire
Week 3 — Isabel Allende
Stories help us understand ourselves and the world.
I am writing a series of blogs that focus on famous women I admire. Each article will feature a woman who I believe has made an impact on our world. The women may be alive or they may be deceased. They may be part of our current experience or they may be historical figures. They all matter in some way.
We all matter in some way.
Passion. Creativity. Generosity.
This week, I am writing about Isabel Allende (1942-). Isabel is a novelist and activist from South America. She was born in Lima, Peru, to Chilean parents. Her father, Tomas Allende, was a South American diplomat who disappeared when Isabel was three years old. Shortly after his disappearance, her mother married Ramón Huidobro, another diplomat, and the family began to travel between Bolivia and Lebanon. In 1958, the family returned to Chile and in 1962, Isabel married Miguel Frias. Isabel and Miguel had two children, Paula and Nicolas.
In 1973, Isabel fled with her family to Venezuela when Salvador Allende, Chile’s president and Isabel’s second cousin, was overthrown in a coup led by Augusto Pinochet. Salvador died in the coup — either by murder or by suicide.
After helping fellow Chileans escape Chile during the political unrest — and then receiving death threats herself — Isabel, Miquel, and their two small children exiled themselves in Venezuela. Though she had been a journalist, it was during her time in Venezuela that she began her novel-writing career. It all started when she wrote a letter to her dying grandfather. That letter eventually became her first published novel, The House of the Spirits. It was published in Spanish in 1982 and in English in 1985.
Since then, Isabel has written nineteen other novels and four non-fiction books. One of her books, Paula, is a memoir and tribute to her daughter who passed away in 1992 after falling into a coma due to a medical error. She was only 29.
In 1987, Isabel and Miquel divorced and Isabel found her way to a new husband (Willie Gordon) and a new life in Northern California. Though Willie and Isabel divorced in 2015, Isabel still lives in California. She married Roger Cukras in July 2019.
Isabel became an American citizen in 1993. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Like so many of us, Isabel is a contradiction — a mix of the best and worst that life has to offer — blessings and tragedy, knowledge and faith, order and chaos. Life hasn’t always been easy for Isabel, but it has been an adventure. Despite the ups and downs, she continues to embrace it all with passion, creativity, and generosity.
“I have not changed,” Isabel has said. “I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.”
Lesson #1 — PASSION
“I want to have an epic life. I want to tell my life with big adjectives. I want to forget all the grays in between, and remember the highlights and the dark moments.”-i.a.
Isabel is petite — only about 5-foot-3-inches tall, but she seems to fill up any room she enters. This is not because she is loud, or boisterous, or rude. She fills up the space in her life with passion. The “magical realism” found in many of Isabel’s novels is an excellent example of this energy.
Isabel lives in the real world. In the 1970s she helped those in need escape persecution in Chile. In the 1990s she created a nonprofit to benefit women and children in need. To this day she is not afraid to confront and talk about the struggles facing women around the world.
But Isabel also lives in the spiritual world. This can be seen in the stories that come to life in her many novels — stories that blend a real-world situation with supernatural or magical elements, such as characters with paranormal powers and rich inner lives.
This is passion. She recognizes and loves the material world but she sees everything through a lens of the spiritual and mystical. Any time I read her books or hear her talk, I feel her passion. “What matters most is the heart,” she has said.
Lesson #2 — CREATIVITY
“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”-i.a.
As a novelist, Isabel collects and shares experiences that are part of being human. She believes that stories help us heal. But she also entertains. She includes a love story between a man and a woman with a mystical story about the spirits we hear but cannot see. This, to me, is the mark of creativity: Blending the real with the imagined and the heart with the mind.
Isabel starts writing all of her books on January 8. This was the day she started writing The House of Spirits years ago — the date in which she found out that her grandfather was dying.
She uses writing to answer questions about the world, about her life, and about the human experience. She starts with a question and then defines and refines it to find an answer.
Themes repeat themselves in Isabel’s books. She writes to find her way, defining a feeling with language to makes it real. Isabel becomes the characters she writes about. It’s an automatic part of her creative process, she has said.
If she writes and it feels “gray,” she rewrites it adding new words and new adjectives to figure out the answer to the question. Explore, define, and give it names…. She finds inspiration in the chaos of life.
But creativity goes beyond the pages of Isabel’s books. For Isabel, the creative process is integrated in everything she does. If you want to do something, she has said, you make it work — any way you can.
Lesson #3 — GENEROSITY
“It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world, and with the divine.”-i.a.
Isabel’s generosity can be seen in the way she connects with people — with her readers, with her audience, and with the world around her. She is not afraid to share her experiences and opinions and, in the process, to light a fire of connection and love in other people.
An ability to connect with people may have been part of the reason Isabel was chosen to represent South America in the opening Ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. She was proud to march in the ceremonies and to represent her home continent. But to this day, she laughs about the experience, claiming that she was difficult to spot below the towering beauty of Sophia Loren.
In a more concrete way, Isabel shares the fruits of her labors — some of the proceeds from her books — with women and girls around the world through the Isabel Allende Foundation. It was, in fact, proceeds from Paula (the memoir about the year following her daughter’s death) that allowed Isabel to set up the non-profit in 1996.
This organization provides grants and other forms of sponsorship to girls and women in need. Today, it is managed by Isabel’s daughter-in-law.
According the website, the mission of the Isabel Allende Foundation is to “invest in the power of women and girls to secure reproductive rights, economic independence, and freedom from violence.”
TO LEARN MORE
There is so much more I could write about Isabel Allende (for example, her views on leadership, religion, and death), but I will stop here.
If you would like to learn more about Isabel, start with her website. There you will find a list of all of her books. Each of her works demonstrates the deep connection she has to the human experience. From there, any number of searches online will provide you with articles and videos with, by, and about Isabel. She continues to write, to advocate, and to live her life with an incredible, heart-felt passion. I hope some day to meet her — or to at least have the privilege to see her speak in person.
Here are the main sources I used for this article:
- Author page and link to other information about her and her life: isabelallende.com
- Isabel Allende Foundation: isabelallende.org
- Isabel Allende: The Heart of Creativity: https://globalleadership.tv/video/isabel-allende-the-heart-of-creativity/isabel-allende-creative-process/
- The Frost Interview — Isabel Allende: “Forever a Foreigner”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VwSP92gvzI
- How to Live Passionately — No Matter What Your Age: htttps://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_how_to_live_passionately_no_matter_your_age
- Tales of Passion: https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion
- Wikipedia articles, starting here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Allende
