An Interview with Isabel Allende

Abstract

MP: Where do you think you got your sense of story telling? IA: In the kitchen. Listening to the maids tell stories. Listening to the radio. In Latin America there is a long tradition of soap operas that started with The Right to Be Born. Imagine what that was! I remember being very small and coming back from school running to hear the next chapter of the soap opera. Always very tragic stories and very sad stories too. I have that in Eva Luna. When Eva Luna is a child she lives in the kitchen. She is a maid, and she listens to the radio. That's the only contact she has with the world. And all the stories that she hears she believes are true stories—I believed when I was a child that they were all true stories. So I thought that the world was full of very interesting people and it was just me that was always bored. Everybody else was having these wonderful love affairs ex cept me. VI: When did you start telling stories? IA: When I was very small. My mother says that I terrorized my brothers with horrible long truculent stories that haunted their days and filled their nights with nightmares. After I had my own children I also told them stories. They would give me the first sentence and immediately I would start the story. I was trained then. I've lost that training now. I've always liked it. I remember always having told stories—and making them up and inventing and exaggerating and lying all the time. VI: Lying? IA: Yes, they were not lies for me because I thought those things really happened, but my mother says I was a terrible liar. I was always punished for lying. MP: How would you describe the difference between lies and truth? IA: For me, I can no longer say. At the beginning there is some truth always. For example, I just went to Switzerland and I received an award. It was a bronze statue. I no longer know what size the bronze statue is. When I