With forays into a friend's plastic surgery, details of arguments with her husband, and an large, unlikely cast with more than their fair share of drama and emotional crises, the memoir can sound like an upmarket soap opera.

She memorably describes Jeremy Irons as looking as if he could have been a likeable taxi driver in the suburbs of London. The film of The House of Spirits, made a few years earlier, brings her into contact with film stars, although some not that 'starry'. California also wouldn’t be California without some mention of celebrities, albeit thankfully brief. This certainly suits her magical realism style of novel writing, with its focus on the dreamworld and on the storytelling tradition. Running through the tales of family life, there is anguish about the circumstances surrounding Paula's death, how the family remembers her, and the effect of the publication of the book about Paula.Īllende's memoir embraces the New Age lifestyle of California, with Zen, prayer circles, I Ching, psychics, therapists and astrologers. Allende explains how she met and married Gordon, her strong desire to draw the family round her in California, her writing and travelling, and the grief she and the family are still experiencing. There is much to tell Paula about this extraordinary tribe. Allende is surrounded by a 'tribe' - her second husband Willie Gordon and his family, her own children and grandchildren, friends acting as adopted aunts, uncles and cousins, friends, and a women's self-help group, The Sisters of Perpetual Disorder. It is based on her journals and daily correspondence with her mother in Chile and is largely in the form of a conversation with Paula about the highs and lows of the extended family. In The Sum of the Days, Allende picks up on her life in California after Paula's death in 1992. It follows on from The House of the Spirits and My Invented Country about her life in Chile where she lived until Pinochet's military coup and, most notably, Paula, a family history written at the bedside of her daughter while she lay in a coma, eventually dying of the inherited condition porphyria. This volume of Isabel Allende's memoirs focuses on the Chilean novelist's life in the US, where she has lived for over 25 years. In the form of a conversation with her dead daughter, Allende chronicles the extraordinary lives of her children, step-children, friends and a whole host of other characters in New Age California. Summary: Allende’s entertaining memoir is based on her journals and daily correspondence with her mother in Chile.

Paula by isabel allende sparknotes