Isabel Allende's latest historical novel draws from her time at a women's magazine
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Think about the one book that changed your life. The book where you can clearly see there's the person you were before reading it and after.

If you could talk to that author, what would you say? For some of us, that's impossible. Like, for me, Faulkner's been dead for a few decades now, so it's not like I can hit him up on Instagram. But for here and now's Deepa Fernandez, that author was Isabel Allende, who just happens to be out with a new historical romance novel titled My Name is Emilia Del Valle. They talk about the new book, but also about how Allende feels about changing the lives of so many people. That's ahead.

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A new novel from Isabel Allende is always a cause for celebration. Her best-selling works include The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna. She sold more than 80 million copies in 42 languages. In 2014, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. And Isabel Allende's latest book, the historical novel, My Name is Amelia del Valle, is a

Paige Turner. I can't wait to talk about it and to welcome to our program, Isabel Allende. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me in your program, Deepa. After many novels that have won so much acclaim, this latest book of yours, it's a historical novel. And your main character, Emilia, is born in 1866 in San Francisco to an Irish wannabe nun who

After her affair with a Chilean aristocrat, I want to know how the idea for this novel was born. How did you cook up your protagonist Amelia?

Well, I started with the event, the Civil War in Chile in 1891. And I wanted to tell it from a sort of outsider's point of view, a narrator that was not in either side of the Civil War. And so I thought, okay, I'll bring someone from California, probably a journalist, probably a war correspondent. But of course, I always want a woman. Women were not war correspondents at that time.

So I needed to have a very good excuse for my protagonist. I thought, okay, she speaks Spanish. So I gave her a stepfather that is Mexican and really he raises her. And then I gave her a biological father in Chile so that she would have an excuse for

to tell the newspaper, well, I have roots, I have family over there, send me. She, you know, has to go in and convince a daily newspaper editor to hire her. She has to write under a male pen name. So she was clearly a very pioneering journalist. And

I want to ask you about you, Isabel. I understand you were a pioneering journalist too. Tell me how you started out and how much of your story can we see in Emilia? People who have read the book say that Emilia is my alter ego. I promise you I wasn't thinking about that at all. But I think all authors draw from their memory and their own experience. So the who we are appears between the lines.

I started as a journalist in a women's magazine that was the first feminist media in Chile in the late 60s. And in that sense, the magazine was very pioneer. I had very good other journalists that taught me the craft. But I knew nothing about it. I mean, it was just so innocent.

And in a way, I think that Emilia is very innocent too because she goes to war thinking it's a great adventure until she finds herself in the battle with death and blood and violence and brutality. And there she realizes what she has gotten into. Yeah. Though her feminist spirit, which is your feminist spirit, really comes through so strongly. I mean, so many of your novels, Isabel, have strong feminist characters. Yes.

And I want to talk about this novel because in addition to having Amelia pushing through boundaries to live her life as an independent professional woman, it's also a love story. And I loved that. But some people might not think writing about romance and feminism go together. Or war. Or war, right. Or war. But we can't have everything in life, can't we? As a feminist, I think that I have many more choices.

But I don't have limitations. I am very romantic. I use makeup and I have been a fierce feminist all my life. I don't think there are opposites. Yeah, yeah. So I just really connected with your character. Obviously, I'm a journalist too. But the stories that Amelia chooses to tell, the voices, the framing she brings...

to whatever story she's telling. It was not the status quo back then, but her stories resonated with me because I think in many ways they're still not part of the mainstream. I think Amelia would still be, you know, an anomaly today, the way she reports. And I have to say, I related a lot to her in the quest to tell different sides of stories.

Why, Isabel, do you think that legacy that Amelia pushed back on back then still persists today in mainstream journalism? You know, as a writer, I'm always looking for the other side of the story. There is the official story, which is always told usually by men and by the people who win the battles or the people who are in power. But the marginal voices we never hear.

And I think that as a journalist, I learned in that magazine to try to find those voices and those subjects that nobody wants to talk about. At that time in Chile, no one was researching or reporting on abortion, infidelity, divorce. There was no divorce in Chile until 2004, right?

So there were lots of topics that were very controversial and we got a lot of aggression for that, but we were pushing those boundaries too. And I think that that's what Emilia does and me as a writer now is

I research a lot for a historical novel, but that's the official story. I need to find the other voices, the voices of the women, the poor, the defeated, the children, the animals. What happened to the horses and the mules in a battle? That kind of question leads me always to go deeper and deeper into the research that is not the official story. Yeah.

I want to take this opportunity to tell you, Isabel, that you single-handedly changed the course of my life. I started seventh grade as a lonely, misfit teen with no friends. And I'd go to the library at lunchtime. And finally, after a couple of weeks, the sweet librarian probably realized what was going on with me. And she put a book in my hand. And she told me this would help transport me to a different world. And, Isabel, that book was The House of the Spirits. Wow.

It was the first novel I ever read and I loved it and it made me want to go to Latin America, this mystical faraway place very far from Sydney, Australia where I was growing up. And I did that when I was 19. I left home with a ticket to Mexico and

I went all the way down over two years to Chile. I learned Spanish. I became a reporter. You are Amelia. You really have the sense of adventure. You take risks. You inspired that, Isabel. Thank you. You inspired that. And I want to know if you think about...

The people, the readers who you inspire as you're sitting down to write a novel. When you write a novel, it's like putting a message in a bottle and you throw it in the sea. You never know which shores it will reach, who will pick it up if they pick it up, and how they will react to the text. I can't even think about that because it would, in a way, paralyze me. I just write the best I can and I just throw my message in a bottle in the sea. Yeah.

I mean, I love that you say you should write what should not be forgotten. And I wonder what Amelia would tell us about the times we're living in right now where writers and journalists are under attack. We're called the fake news, threatened with lawsuits, fired even for reporting political realities that clash with powerful and more dominant narratives. Isabel, leave us with some hope.

Does journalism today make a difference? Of course it does. And that's why there's censorship in any authoritarian government. And I know because I have lived it. The first people that are targeted are those who have some influence on public opinion. And those are first the journalists and artists and then professors at universities, teachers, people who can really make you think and ask the questions and organize some kind of resistance.

What is important here is the numbers. Many, many people have to stand up and oppose the authoritarian government. That takes a while because people are afraid and fear is a very powerful tool. But it happens. It always happens. What is next for you? This is a brilliant novel. I'm sure it'll be eaten up like all your previous ones. Are you working on anything new after this one? I am working on a memoir.

which I don't like so much. I like to write fiction because I'm a very good liar. But a memoir requires, I have to be truthful to the events and the people and the emotions of the time. And that's harder. But I have the correspondence with my mother. We wrote to each other every single day for decades. That is an incredible resource. Incredible.

It's wonderful. Well, I hope you do it soon and come back and talk to us. Isabel Allende's latest novel is My Name is Emilia del Valle. Isabel Allende, thank you so much. Thank you, Deepa. Thank you for reading me also.

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