Isabel Allende on Fiction and Feminism

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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison. In every issue of our magazine, we publish a feature we call Life's Work. It's an interview with someone who's been wildly successful outside the traditional corporate world. For a May edition, I spoke with the author Isabel Allende. Her first novel, the House of the Spirits, she wrote at age 39 while living in Venezuela as a political exile from Chile. It began as a letter to her dying grandfather and became an international bestseller. She's since written more than 20 books, the latest of which is the Japanese Lover. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

You always start your novels on the same date that you started the House of the Spirits. Why do you do that?

At the beginning, I suppose it was superstition because the first book had been so lucky and it was like a lucky day. But now it's just discipline. I need to organize my life. My life is really busy and there's much more than just sitting in front of the computer. So I need to save some months in the year to be in a sort of retreat. I need time and silence that I don't usually have in my normal life. So if I don't set aside those months, I would never be able to write. Having a starting day, it's good for me and everybody around me. Everybody knows that by January 8th I'm not available anymore and that gives me the time I need, right?

Does that mean that you always have to have a book idea in mind by January 8th? Or do you sometimes sit down with no specific idea or direction?

Often I have something in mind, but very vaguely I never have a script. I may have something that I have researched, like a time and a place that I have researched. For example, I wrote a story about the slave revolt in Haiti 200 years ago. So I had researched the time and the place and the event, and I had some information, but I had no characters, no story, no ending, nothing. So that is when I have at least that it's a good starting point. Other times I just sit in front of the computer and let a first sentence come out of the belly. And that's the opening line for a story that I don't even know what the story is about.

And how does your writing process progress from there?

Slowly. The first few weeks are terrible because I have not found the narrative voice. I Don't have the tone of the book yet. I don't have the groove. And so at the beginning it's just very jerky. And I know that all those pages will be lost, they will all end up in the trash. But it's part of the training that I need to get informed and start writing. So after a few weeks, then the characters start to appear to talk by themselves, to tell me their stories. The story unfolds slowly and then I feel that I'm going on the right path. It's just a matter of showing up and keep doing it.

What do you do when it's taking a very, very long time for that path to emerge? Is there anything you do to sort of jumpstart yourself?

Sometimes I feel that maybe it's not the right story, that I'm not supposed to write that story if it's not happen. But most of the time I just show up and keep doing it. And sooner or later it will happen. I've learned that and I have learned to trust my skill. But this has taken a very, very long time. At the beginning, I always had the idea that each book was like a gift from heaven and it would not happen again. But now I know that I have the skill. I have acquired it after 30 years of writing. And if I give myself a subject and enough time to research, I can write about almost anything. So that gives me some self confidence that I didn't have before and I can write more relaxed and enjoy the process more.

Right.

The House of the Spirits was so widely acclaimed and became so popular around the world. Is that difficult when that happens to your first novel? Do you ever feel as if you're chasing that success?

I haven't felt it. But when my agent, who unfortunately died very recently.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Yeah. Carmen Balzeus was the godmother of book that I have written. She got the manuscript of the House of the Spirits in Spain and she read it and called me to Venezuela and she said, everybody can write a first good book because they pour into it everything they have, all their past, their memories, their expectations, everything the writer is proven on the second book. So I started writing my second book on January 8th the following year to prove to this agent that I had never met, that I could write, that I could be a writer. But I had not perceived yet the success of the House of the Spirits because all the success was happening in Europe and I was living in Venezuela and I didn't realize, I wasn't aware. And by the time I became Aware of the success, I had already finished the second book. And so, in a way, every book is different. Every book has a different way of being told. Different rhythm, tone, narrative voice. Each one is a different challenge. So I'm never comparing, I'm never saying, is this better or worse than the House of the Spirits, or better or worse than Paola? I feel that every book is an offering and you just put it on the table and see who will accept it.

You have described yourself as a complete feminist who was always determined to work. Why was having a career so important to you?

Because I wanted to support myself. First of all, I'm not good at staying at home. I never was. I had two children and I adored them. But I trusted my mother in law and an adopted grandmother to help me raise them because I needed to get out, I needed to be in the world. But mostly as a very, very young woman, I didn't want to depend, I wanted to pay my own bills. So working was really essential for me. I think that one of the things that shaped me mostly was that I saw my mother as a victim. My mother was a beautiful young woman who married the wrong man and was abandoned by that man with three babies. She had a kid every 11 months, and she had three babies in four years. And my father abandoned us. And so my mother went to live in her father's house. I grew up with my grandparents in that house. And my grandmother died and my mother didn't have any money, she didn't have proper education, she didn't have a skill to work. She depended completely on her father and her brother, her older brother. She didn't have anything, no independence. All the privileges, the money, the car, the freedom was for the men in the family, my grandfather and my uncles, but not for my mother. And I didn't want to be like my mother. I adore my mother and we've been very, very close all our lives. But I didn't want to be like her. I never trusted that someone would take care of me, ever. And that was a very important factor to make me a feminist. Very soon, very early in my life, when feminism was not something that people were even talking about in Chile, I already had the anger and the ideas and everything, but I couldn't express them. It was later, when I was a teenager, when I started reading American and British feminists, that I realized that there was a movement, that there was a language to express all this.

You obviously come from an important political legacy in Chile. Did you ever consider becoming a political leader?

No, no. I have a cousin who has my name. She's called Isabela Yande Bussi. And she is the politician in the family, not me. I know I'm not made for that.

And why aren't you made for it?

Because I'm a writer. I mean, I like to be alone. I want to be quiet, alone, creating my own stories in my head and in my heart. I can't be out there compromising and dealing and willing with politicians. Are you crazy? No.

Ms. Allende, it was such a pleasure speaking with you.

Oh, thank you, Alison. Thank you very much.

That was the author, Isabel Allende. For more Life's Work interviews, go to hbr.org.