The narrator of your new novel is a 19- year-old American who knows next to nothing about her grandmother’s past in Chile. What do your grandchildren know of your Chilean past?
I have taken them to Chile but they don’t speak Spanish. I don’t think they know very much about Chile. They don’t quite understand what a military dictatorship is – they can’t envisage it. It’s hard to explain this. I’ve written books about it and I hope some day they’ll read them with attention.
They’re growing up as Americans. Do you talk to them about the role the US played in overthrowing the government of Salvador Allende?
Yes, all the time. And not only to my grandchildren. I live in the US and I think it is my duty, every time I speak in public, to tell Americans what their foreign policy has been, the awful things that have been done in the name of democracy.
We get a glimpse of Chile’s past in this book. Was this a way of reaching back to a pre-Pinochet Chile?
I’ve always been interested not so much in the pre-Pinochet period as in the time during which we had the dictatorship – 17 years in which the country changed completely. It became very polarised and divided.
Even today, nearly 25 years after the dictatorship ended, there are people who deny the atrocities that were committed during the time the military was in power; or else they will justify them – they will say, “It was either that or become a communist dictatorship.” And there are other people who suffered during that time, who were in prison or tortured or had to leave and live in exile – such people can see nothing positive in the years of dictatorship.
In the novel, there is a secret in the narrator Maya’s family, which she discovers at the very end of the book. There’s a secret in the family and there’s a secret in the country. So, in a way, the micro-melodrama of that family is amplified by the macro-melodrama of the country.
Maya flees to the island of Chiloé, where she listens to the islanders’ stories. Have the stories of Chile’s indigenous peoples influenced you as a writer?
I grew up in my grandfather’s house and my grandfather was a great storyteller. At that time, there was no television in Chile and the radio was forbidden at home – my grandfather considered it an instrument of vulgar ideas. So we would listen to his stories. There was a mythological, epic quality to even the most banal story.
Maya has been brought up in Berkeley, California, which occupies a special place in the American imagination, doesn’t it?
Yes. It’s known as the “Independent Popular Republic of Berkeley”! It’s very liberal. The last remaining old hippies all live in Berkeley. You see them with their Birkenstock sandals. I love it. I go there all the time, although I live on the other side of the bay.
One of the themes of the book is the deranging effects of grief. We learn from Maya’s journal that she went off the rails after her grandfather died.
She adores her grandfather and when he dies she feels abandoned. So she gets in with the wrong people and ends up running away from home and becoming homeless, on drugs. But it’s the memory of the grandfather that saves her. I have lived through the tragedy of my husband’s children. They’re all addicts. The daughter has died. The elder son has spent half his life in prison. And in March, the younger son died of an overdose. So the family is in a very dark place right now.
I have lived the horror of drugs, how they destroy not only the person who takes them but the people around that person. It’s very hard to survive addiction.
The book is also about the redeeming power of writing, isn’t it? Writing is a way for Maya to process her grief.
I’ve lived that, too. Writing a memoir about the death of my daughter saved me from going crazy. It allowed me to understand and accept what happened. I will always carry sadness with me but it has not destroyed my life. I was able to process it, as you say – it was very cathartic.
Isabel Allende’s “Maya’s Notebook” is published by Fourth Estate (£12.99)
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