About My Writing

Often people ask me how much truth is there in my books, and how much I have invented. I could swear that every word is true. If it has not happened, it certainly will. I can no longer trace a line between reality and fantasy. Before I was called a liar, now that I make a living with these lies, I am called a writer. May be we should simply stick to poetic truth.

In his Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano has a story that I love. To me it is a splendid metaphor of writing. “There was an old and solitary man who spent most of his time in bed. There were rumors that he had a treasure hidden in his house. One day some thieves broke in, they searched everywhere and found a chest in the cellar. They went off with it and when they opened it they found that it was filled with letters. They were the love letters the old man had received all over the course of his long life. The thieves were going to burn the letters, but they talked it over and finally decided to return them. One by one. One a week. Since then, every Monday at noon, the old man would be waiting for the postman to appear. As soon as he saw him, he would start running and the postman, who knew all about it, held the letter in his hand. And even St. Peter could hear the beating of that heart, crazed with joy at receiving a message from a woman.”

Isn't this the playful substance of literature?... An event transformed by poetic truth. Writers are like those good thieves, they take something that is real, like the letters, and by a trick of magic they transform it into something totally fresh. That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.

Good fiction is not only the thrill of a plot, at its best it is an invitation to explore beyond the appearance of things, it challenges the reader's safety, it questions reality. Yes, it can be disturbing. But there may be a reward at the end. With some luck, the author and the reader, hand in hand, may stumble upon some particles of truth. Usually, however, that is not the intention of the author in the first place. The writer merely suffers from an uncontrollable need to tell the story. There is nothing more to it, believe me.

On Romance

This is the part where I have to get personal and talk about romance.

My books force me to travel frequently. My karma is to stumble from one place to another, like a wandering pilgrim. In l987, while still living in Venezuela, I went on a lecturing tour that took me from Iceland to Puerto Rico, and many other climates in between, until I ended up in Northern California. Little did I suspect that there my fate would change again. I met the man that was written in my destiny, as my mother would say. He was an American lawyer called William Gordon, who was introduced to me as the last heterosexual bachelor in San Francisco. He had read my second novel and liked it. When he saw me he was thoroughly disappointed, however: he likes tall blondes.

After my speech we were invited to a dinner party in an Italian restaurant. There was a full moon and Frank Sinatra was singing “Strangers in the Night”, the kind of stuff that would ruin a novel. Willie was sitting in front of me, observing me with a puzzled expression. The combination of Frank Sinatra and spaghetti tutto mare had a predictable effect on me: I fell in lust. I had been living in chastity for a very long time... two or three weeks as I recall, so I took the initiative. I asked him to tell me his life. This trick always works, ladies! Ask any man to talk about himself and pretend to listen while you relax and enjoy your meal, and he will end up convinced that you are a smart and sexy gal. In this case, however, I did not have to pretend. Soon I realized I had stumbled upon one of those rare gems that storytellers are always looking for: that man's life was a novel! So I did what any normal Latin American female writer would have done: marry the man to get the story. Well, I didn't marry him right away, it took some fine manipulation.

First he invited me to his house. I was expecting a romantic evening in a divorcee's penthouse overlooking the Golden Gate bridge, soft jazz, champagne and smoked salmon. I got nothing of the sort. There was so much dog crap in the garage, that he had to pull back so that I could step out of the car. His youngest son, a ten year old brat, greeted us with rubber bullets. The golden retriever as hyperactive as the kid, placed his muddy paws on my shoulders and slurped on my face. There were other pets: a couple of maniac rats in a filthy cage chewing on each other's tails, and dead fish floating in the slimy waters of an aquarium. I didn't flinch. Lust does that to some people, it gives them an heroic attitude. I liked the man and I wanted to hear the rest of his story. He served a burnt chicken, we drank cheap California wine, and I will skip the rest. The next day, when he took me to the airport, I asked him politely if we had any sort of commitment. He turned chalk-pale and his hands trembled so vigorously that he had to pull over. I didn't know that you never EVER mention the word commitment in front of an American male.
- What are you talking about, we just met! he mumbled, terrified.
- I am 45 and I have no time to waste, I said. I need to know if this thing is serious or not.
- What thing?- he asked befuddled.

That day I took the plane, but a week later I was back without an invitation. I moved into his house and six months later he had to marry me because pinned him against the wall.

Yes, I did write Willie's life after all. The book is called THE INFINITE PLAN, and it is the story of a flawed man with a big heart.

Willie and I have been together for many years and our love has survived many ups and downs, great success and great losses.

Paula

In December 1991 my daughter Paula, who had a rare genetic condition called Porphyry, fell in a coma in Spain. Neglect in the Intensive Care Unit caused severe brain damage, and she ended up in a vegetative state. We took her home to California and cared for her until she died in my arms, a year later. Paula's long agony was an ordeal for our family. It went from bad to worse when a few months later Willie's daughter, Jennifer, died of an overdose. They say that there is no pain as great as that of losing a child... Mourning did not bring Willie and me closer. We are strong and stubborn people, I suppose we could not admit that our hearts were broken. It took a long time and a lot of therapy for us to be able to embrace and cry together.

After Paula's death, writing was the only thing that kept me relatively sane. Grief was a long journey into the underworld, it was like walking alone in a dark tunnel. My way of walking through the tunnel was to write. Every morning I dragged myself out of bed and went to my office, I would light a candle in front of Paula's picture, turn on the computer and start to cry. Often the pain was unbearable and I would stare at the screen for hours, incapable of writing a word. Other times the sentences would just flow, like dictated from the Beyond by Paula herself. A year later I was at the end of the tunnel, I could see light and I discovered, amazed, that I had written another book and that I didn't pray to die anymore, I wanted to live.

My book PAULA is a memoir, the tragic story of the untimely death of a young woman, but mainly a celebration of life. Two stories intertwine in those pages: that of my daughter Paula, and my own adventurous destiny. Her long agony gave me a unique opportunity to review my past. For a whole year my life stopped completely, there was nothing to do, only wait and remember. Slowly, I learned to see the patterns of my existence and asked myself all the fundamental questions: What is there at the other side of life? Is it only night, silence and solitude? What remains when there are no more desires, memories or hope?

After I finished that memoir, I could not write fiction for almost three years. I thought that my well of stories and the need to tell them had dried forever. And then I remembered that I am a journalist by training and if I am given a subject and time to research, I can write about almost anything. Well, not sports or politics...! I gave myself a subject as removed from grief as possible and ended up writing APHRODITE, a divagation about lust and gluttony, the only deadly sins that are worth the trouble.

The research for that book, done mostly in the porn shops of the gay neighborhood of San Francisco, pulled me out of the depression and brought me back to my body. The first symptom was an erotic dream. I dreamt that I placed a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, slathered him with guacamole and salsa, rolled him up and ate him... The therapy of writing about food and love worked and shortly after publishing APHRODITE I started a novel about the Gold Rush in California, called DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE. It is the story of Eliza Sommers, an orphan girl, raised by a British family in the Chilean port of Valparaíso in the mid nineteenth century. At sixteen Eliza goes to the California gold rush following her lover. I thought I was writing a love story, but really this novel is about freedom, a recurrent theme in my life. Like Eliza Sommers, I was determined from very early on to find my own way. That made me a feminist at a time and in a place where feminism was the equivalent of Satanic possession.

That novel was followed by PORTRAIT IN SEPIA, also a historical novel, this time placed in Chile during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the story of Aurora del Valle, the granddaughter of Eliza Sommers. Although this book is not a sequel, because it can be read independently, it picks up several characters from DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE and some of my first novel, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. These three books can be considered a trilogy. Aurora del Valle suffers a trauma at a very early age and she blocks her past: she can't remember those years. Her quest is to unravel the mysteries of her life and the family secrets. PORTRAIT IN SEPIA is a novel about memory. Also this theme, like freedom, is particularly relevant in my own life. I have been traveling always, I don't really belong anywhere. My roots are in my memory. Every book is a journey into the past, into the soul, and into memory.

A historical novel is a fascinating endeavor. While writing the three novels of this trilogy I entered a time machine and went back to 1848, all the way to 1973: a span of more than a hundred years. Can you imagine the research this endeavor required?

In 2001 I wrote a novel for children and young adults: THE CITY OF THE BEASTS. It was so much fun! It is the story of Alexander Cold, a fifteen years old American boy who goes in a trip to the Amazon, where he meets a strange girl called Nadia Santos. Together they experience a magic adventure among Stone Age Indians. I hope to write more novels with the same protagonists, the idea of a series is very tempting.

All fiction is ultimately autobiographical. I write about love and violence, about death and redemption, about strong women and absent fathers, about survival. Most of my characters are outsiders, people who are not sheltered by the society, who are unconventional, irreverent, defiant.