“I love this country in general and California in particular. Diversity fascinates me. All the races of the plant come here with their traditions and dreams. Everything new or important starts here or comes here. I like the awareness, the sense of future, the generosity of the people. The young and optimistic energy of California is so attractive. Also their sense of freedom; this is as far west as you can get.” – Isabel Allende
In a restored Victorian on a quiet street in old Sausalito, bright beams of sunlight cascade through curved panes of shiny glass, filtered through the leaves of an oak tree on the patio dancing in the breeze. The walls are white, the floors blonde, the furniture elegant. Isabel Allende walks quietly up the stairs and the room springs to life.
Isabel Allende is a petite, elegant, middle-aged attractive woman, today wearing soft-toned business dress, colorful wrap and formal black pumps, her dark-brown hair cut fashionably short. She is, as she admits later with a sweet smile, “very bourgeois” in her love of fine things.
Allende is one of the world’s most famous and best selling writers, the author of a dozen books, starting with the acclaimed 1982 novel The House of the Spirits. Several have been made into motion pictures. Her novels are sold in many languages in dozens of countries. If there is such a thing as ‘world music,’ then Allende’s stories are world class ‘world literature,’ full of wit and romance and magic realism. Yet before making her fulltime home in America, life was not always so rosy.
In her birthplace of Chile, her uncle Salvador Allende was murdered by the death squads of Colonel Augusto Pinochet in a CIA-engineered coup. She spent many years in exile in Venezuela, enduing an unhappy marriage and working as a journalist. It was not until she discovered the Bay Area on a book tour in the 1980s, and fell in love, that she came to find happiness and a place to call “home.” Today, she will tell you, home is where the heart is. For Allende, home is Marin County, in a house atop a hill in San Rafael and an office in Sausalito.
In her short story ‘A Home in Paradise’ recently written for a compendium of travel tales called A House Somewhere; Tales of Life Abroad, Allende writes that, as an immigrant to California, she thought she would never adapt.
“Marin County is quite a Peyton Place, full of divorcees, gay/lesbian couples and Zen monks; hundreds of ecologists, vegetarians, earth mothers and masseuses: thousands of people in recovery,” she writes. “We even have had one or two serial killers. Half the population is into crystals, gurus, Tantric sex or saving whales. Those who are not in search of enlightenment are in search of the perfect croissant.”
Today she spends her time doing interviews at her office, going books tours, speaking at conferences and – every January 8th – writing a new book. When not at home or in her office, she can often be found at her very favorite location in the whole world - Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera. Recently she spoke with the Intentional Traveler’s Michael McCarthy….
“It was my fiancé William who first took me down to Book Passage. This was many years ago, before we were married. I saw they had some of my books on sale there, translated into English. Elaine (Book Passage owner and manager Elaine Petrocelli) recognized me from my books and bought me a cup of mango tea. We became friends and Book Passage became a place for me to go. I still go there nearly every day.
It was a very hectic time in my life back then. If I wanted to write, I would have to get into my car and go into the city. I would write in parks and coffee shops and even in the car. Elaine provided a mailbox for me at Book Passage so people could drop letters for me there. That was my first office.
I couldn’t write a novel sitting in a car but I could write short stories. The advantage to this is because with a short story you write fragments. In a couple of weeks you have a story and then you do some more. If you really want to do something you do it in the most awkward circumstances, of course. I did my first novel The House of the Spirits writing only at night after I worked all day for 12 hours; two different shifts at two different jobs. I wrote at night in a little kitchen. It was really hard. It’s like falling in love, though; you make love behind closed doors if you have to.
I go to Book Passage because I feel comfortable there, but it’s also like a social club for me. I get to meet so many people there. They hold for me the reader’s copies of the new novels that are just in and that no one has read yet. I participate in their programs and conferences. The Travel Writer’s Conference hosts a dinner party at my house very year. So it’s much more than just another bookstore for me.
Elaine is my good friend. She’s always reliable, she’s always there, she’s very knowledgeable and she knows everything I need to know about politics, about what is going on in the world. From gossip to the most cultivated things in the world, she can handle anything. So we talk about a lot of things and then there is family too. She comes to my house, to the pool; tomorrow I am going to a wedding in her family. She makes things available to me that I would not have otherwise; I don’t think I could meet people like Al Gore if she didn’t invite me to meet him. She opens a lot of doors not only for me but also for a lot of other people.
There are very few bookstores in the United States that are really dedicated to travel writing. Book Passage started as a travel writer’s bookstore and that’s why it’s called that name. Then it expanded into other things, but it started with books and maps on travel. You know, Americans need to see more of the world; they are very provincial. At one time there was something like the town square where people could meet and talk. Now you can go to Book Passage, it’s like a market of ideas.
These days the emphasis is on corporate marketing and big publishers promoting famous writers and it is very difficult for new writers and new voices to break in, but I have lived long enough to see there is always a reaction to such events. People react to such events and the pendulum starts swinging the other way. I don’t think the corporate world will win. This is just part of the struggle, because the industry is changing. In the movie industry you had these huge, huge studios that once controlled and monopolized everything. They told us what we could watch, but now you have all these independent moviemakers. Good things take time, but it happens.
I find it to my advantage that I am bi-cultural, that I can speak two languages. The sense that I know more about history and geography makes me richer than having one culture. I have become an American citizen and I do feel responsible for what happens here. I vote, I belong here and I want to change things here. I am involved in certain things because I feel that this is my home. As an exile you go to a place because you are forced to, you are expelled from your home. You go to a new place and you are always looking back, you are living in the past, you are waiting for the moment to go back. As an immigrant you don’t want to go back, you look to the future.
I travel often for inspiration, to places like the Amazon and Nepal. I go a lot to Chile and I have traveled over all of South America. I travel a lot for book tours and I hate it. You take a different plane every day and sleep in a different bed every night but you answer the same questions every day. After you have answered the same questions for the third time you start making up the answers, so at the end you feel like you are lying all the time, changing things, just to make it interesting. Then at the end of it all you feel awful.
What interests me about living in Marin is a combination of things. I live in one small town and I work in another but I have the feeling that I am in a cosmopolitan and sophisticated place just a few minutes away from San Francisco. Here I am in the middle of everything. I love nature and it is so beautiful here, the hills, the water, Napa Valley. My house overlooks the bay and the view is wonderful.
I like the fact that Marin is quite a liberal place. There are a lot of things going on, cultural things. I don’t like that it is becoming so wealthy and lily white here in Marin. Because it has become so expensive many people of color have moved away and that saddens me quite a bit. It is also a shame that many younger people don’t live here, because they can’t afford it, so they go to the city. I think it is dangerous when the young start running away. On the other hand, it is peaceful here, there are a lot of writers here and it is very safe. I never worry about locking the door in my house, and all my family is around. It is a good life.”