‘I hate kids,’ Chilean author Isabel Allende told the audience of children, parents and teachers at Seven Arrows Elementary, mere minutes after she took to the dais last Thursday afternoon. Her point, as an internationally renowned writer with more than 55 million books sold worldwide, was that carving out the peace and quiet to write her famous novels was sheer battle. ‘I wrote ‘The House of the Spirits’ in the kitchen, wrote ‘City of the Beasts’ in the closet,’ Allende continued, discussing her struggle to get away from family while creating her award-winning works. Looking fresh-faced and elegant with an avocado-on-black ensemble and her dark hair tied back in a pony tail, the spunky Allende kept everyone on their toes mentally and on the edge of their seats, literally. ‘Everybody lives in the noise, in a hurry, on a cell,’ she said. ‘There is no time to go inside. All conceptions come from a very quiet place inside.’ Here in the U.S., the writer has become best known for ‘Spirits’ (1982), the subject of a 1993 Hollywood adaptation, and the 2005 genre fiction ‘Zorro: A Novel.’ Her ‘City of the Beasts,’ magic realism fiction aimed at young teens, centered on an adventure in the heart of the Amazon. She also wrote a memoir, ‘The Sum of Our Days.’ Her latest novel, ‘In’s of My Soul,’ came out in 2006. Allende’s informal lecture (mostly questions and answers from the audience of about 75 people) proved as robust and spicy as the salsa verde and mole sauce being served on freshly baked tortillas prior to her talk. Following a Spanish-language performance by Seven Arrows students, the charismatic and unpretentious Allende assumed the mike and comically gave direction to her host on microphone etiquette. Allende, who was born in Peru in 1942, revealed that she grew up sharing books with her predominantly male adult household (‘there were no books for children in my house when I was growing up’), and that she has never met the great practitioner of magic realism Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She had the opportunity, once spotting the legendary Colombian author of ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ in a bar. But she was too chicken to introduce herself to him. When a parent and Allende loyalist in the audience said that she enjoyed the film adaptation of ‘Spirits,’ Allende shot back, ‘I actually liked the movie better than the book because Antonio Banderas is in it!’ Allende explained the difference between her medium and Hollywood’s: ‘In a book, you’re inside the characters. In a movie, you’re watching them from the outside.’ As for any criticism that the ‘Spirits’ movie was not Latin enough, Allende quipped, ‘Why would it look Latin when it was financed with German money and shot by a Danish director in Denmark with American actors?’ Allende spoke about the time when, as a journalist, she visited the great Chilean author Pablo Neruda (focus of the 1994 Italian film ‘Il Postino’). After spending the better part of the day with Neruda, Allende was ready for their interview. ‘What interview?’ Neruda snapped. ‘You are the worst journalist in the country. You lie all the time and you are always inserting yourself into your articles.’ Then he said something that Allende would never forget: ‘Why don’t you turn to literature, where these defects are virtues?’ And so, she did. Allende’s next memoir will pick up from where ‘Sum’ left off’ with the 1992 death of her 29-year-old daughter Paula”beginning with the scattering of her daughter’s ashes. Her preview of this work-in-progress proved as entertaining as all the rollicking, off-the-cuff bantering that came before it. Allende detailed how her son married Celia, a vile Venezualan woman who practiced the most radical form of Roman Catholicism (the Opus Dei, as demonized in ‘The Da Vinci Code’) and was outwardly provincial, racist and homophobic. During the course of her marriage, after moving to America, Celia went from religious to agnostic, and she dropped the racist front when she realized that, as Allende put it, ‘In America, she’s not white, she’s a minority!’ Late one night, Celia phoned Allende from California. The call woke up Allende and her husband in the middle of the night, while they were vacationing in India. ‘I have news for you, Isabel,’ a histrionic Celia declared. ‘I am bisexual!’ Allende’s husband took the news so seriously, he rolled back over and fell asleep. To add insult to injury, Celia, the former homophobe, had taken up with the fianc’e of Allende’s stepson. ‘Can you imagine what happened to the family?’ Allende said, smiling. ‘A mess!’ After another round of audience laughter, Allende quipped, ‘With a family like mine, you don’t have to invent anything.’
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