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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Isabel Allende on Her Latest Novel, 'My Name is Emilia del Valle'
00:27:33
Chilean novelist Isabel Allende discusses her latest novel, My Name is Emilia del Valle.
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- [00:00]
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I am really grateful that you are here on today's show. Canadian musician Bells Larson will join us for a listening party for his new album Blurring Time. Actor Lily Taylor is here to talk about her very first book. It's called Turning to Birds. And artist Jesse Crimes is here to talk about his work advocating for formerly incarcerated artists as well as the new exhibition of his work currently on display at the Met. That is our plan. So let's get this started with best selling author Isabel Allende. Who's ever heard of a female journalist is a question that is asked of Isabel Allende's new novel. The answer is Amelia de Valle. That's who she is the protagonist of a story that takes us from San Francisco to Chile in the late 1800s. It was during the Chilean Civil War which put the Chilean President against the Chilean Congress and the Chilean army against the Navy. Amelia goes to Chile to cover the conflict and tries to find her biological father. The book is full of historical facts, not only about the Civil War but also about social class in Chile and dropped here and there are the names of feminists like suffragist Victoria Woodhull, who believed in a woman's right to divorce, or Fanny Fern, a well known female columnist. The book is part history lesson and a part tale of those who tell our stories. Isabela Allende's books have been translated into 40 languages and sold more than 80 million copies. Whether you are the fan of her first book, the House of the Spirits or the last time she was on our show with the Wind Knows my name in 2023. We are happy to welcome her back. The book My Name is Amelia Deval is out tomorrow May 6th. Isabel will be at Symphony Space tomorrow night at 7pm to talk about it. For more information, head to symphony space.org welcome Isabel.
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Isabel Allende
Thank you Alison for having me in your program. Thank you very much.
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Alison Stewart
All right, before we get into the characters, before we get into the Chilean Civil War, before we get into the plot, I want people to understand our protagonist. What adjectives would you use to describe Amelia?
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Isabel Allende
I Think she was courageous, she would take risks, she was curious and she was fearless, and I like that. But many of my female characters are like that. They are women that are way ahead of their time.
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Alison Stewart
The story takes place in San Francisco and Chile. Was there any connection between these two places in the 1800s?
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Isabel Allende
Yes, actually there was, because the most important port of the Pacific was Valparaiso in Chile. So if you wanted to come to San Francisco, you had to come through Cape Horn. This was before the Panama Canal. So you would stop in Valparaiso, the Chilean port, and then travel all the way to San Francisco. So there was a connection there from the time of the gold rush. But there are many other connections. You know, I have been living in California, north of California, for almost 40 years, and it looks like Chile in me, the same vegetation, the rough Pacific Ocean, the weather is similar. Yeah, there are a lot of similarities.
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Alison Stewart
Oh, that's so interesting.
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Isabel Allende
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
In the 1800s, Amelia was a child of a woman named Molly Walsh, who, we learn in the book, had a relationship with a, quote, a very wealthy Chilean. Molly was a nun.
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Isabel Allende
Well, she was not really a relationship. It was just a very quick. A quickie, let's call it. And from the quickie we had consequences. And that was Emilia.
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Alison Stewart
Was this the basis for your character? Was this something that you knew of happening in the 18th century?
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Isabel Allende
It has happened since. Humanity exists, but in the 1800s, for a woman to be an unwedded mother was such a stigma. It was just terrible. And this was a novice from a convent that gets pregnant from this guy that was passing by. She knows practically nothing about him. He seduces her and abandons her immediately. But she will have a life. She marries a wonderful man who is a teacher, a Mexican teacher in a very modest little school in the Mission District in San Francisco. And this stepfather raises Emilia to be the person she eventually becomes. This self confident, risk taking, courageous, daring and funny woman.
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Alison Stewart
Her stepfather, she just loves him so much. Papo, she calls him. What did Amelia gain from him being raised by him?
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Isabel Allende
Independence, language. She learned Spanish. And when she hears that there is a chance of. Of going to the civil war in Chile as a journalist, what she tells the editor is, I can speak Spanish and I have connections. I have family over there. She doesn't know anybody there and her Spanish is. Well, it's good Spanish, but that will be what will set her apart. Yeah. And finally she will go because of that.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Isabel Allende. Her latest novel follows an intrepid reporter covering the Chilean civil war. It's called. My name is Emilia de Valliere, Emilia's mom. Why does she get married to Papo? Why does she see. Why does she see that as her option?
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Isabel Allende
Because she's pregnant. She's pregnant and she does. I mean, she's an outcast. And Popo, who is older than her, says, and your child will have a father, and I will protect you, and I will give you my name. And she does. And eventually she falls in love with him madly.
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Alison Stewart
She does fall in love with him, which is kind of lovely.
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Isabel Allende
Yeah. After a few years, she falls in love with him because he's such a good person and treats her and her child so well.
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Alison Stewart
We talked about what she got, Amelia got from her father, the person she calls her father. What does Amelia get from her mother, if anything?
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Isabel Allende
Well, her mother instills in her the idea that she comes from an aristocratic family in Chile and she will inherit something which is, of course, like a fantasy for her. It's just a story. She doesn't care for that at all. She has absolutely no interest in her biological father because she has this other stepfather who is wonderful. And that happened to me, in a way. I had a wonderful stepfather, and I never met my father, and I had no interest in him because I had this substitute that was so wonderful. So that happens to her. But her mother is also very practical, very strong, workaholic, disciplined. The stepfather has all the artistic, intellectual interest that he's a student of life, and the mother is just all practical knowledge, and that's what she gives her.
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Alison Stewart
It's so interesting, because a stepfather is a father. I almost don't need the word step in front of it.
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Isabel Allende
Yes, you're right. It can be. It can be.
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Alison Stewart
Good point.
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Isabel Allende
And I was very lucky, really.
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Alison Stewart
Tell me about your stepfather.
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Isabel Allende
My stepfather was exactly like Emilia's stepfather. It's just an homage to him. He died in 2019, and I miss him to this day. He was 102 years old, and he was my best friend, and he gave me a lot of what I have had in life.
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Alison Stewart
Amelia starts a career as a writer. She uses a pen name, brand.
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Isabel Allende
Oh, that's because women were not supposed to be writers.
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Alison Stewart
How did you come up with the name that you gave him?
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Isabel Allende
I tried to find a name that was very masculine, you know, because she was writing dime novels. Dime novels of the time were read by almost illiterate men. Women didn't read those dime novels because they were about cowboys and bandits and duels and that kind of stuff. And women didn't have time to read, if they knew how to read. They were working, so they didn't have time to read. And the women of leisure who had time to read would read Jane Austen.
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Alison Stewart
What did having this pen name, what did it allow her to do? What did it allow Amelia to accomplish.
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Isabel Allende
To become a journalist? She was writing like a man, but she couldn't publish with a woman's name. So she used this pen name to publish her chronicles in the examiner. But then when she's sent to the war in Chile, she demands that her reports be with her own name. That's why the title of the book My Name is Emilia del Valle. Don't call me any other name. This is my woman's name, and I defend it.
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Alison Stewart
She takes no guff, no guff from her editor. She doesn't want to be reporting on Tease or the women's pages. She wants to report on crime. She wants to report on politics. What's her motivation for reporting with this?
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Isabel Allende
She's curious. She really is curious about the world. You know, when I started working as a journalist, when I was young, I was just so fascinated by the profession because I could be in the streets participating in life, in what was going on. I could ring the bell in any house, ask the most impertinent questions, and people would answer because I was a journalist. It was just a key to everything. And I think that that's what she loves about that job.
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Alison Stewart
I love that. When I hear you talk about when you were a journalist, do you still have that sense when you read about the news or events, do you still get that little bit of that journalist feeling?
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Isabel Allende
Not anymore. Because I have not been a journalist for a very long time. But in my work as a writer, I use the skills that I learned in journalism, how to structure in journalism, the news. But for me, it's the book. So that you grab the reader by the neck at the beginning with the first few sentences and keep the interest to the very end because you are competing with other media how to conduct an interview and extract from the person you are interviewing the information he or she doesn't want to give you. How do you research and check the research, have more than one source? All those things help me a lot.
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Alison Stewart
Amelia actually first starts as a columnist. They call her a columnist.
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Isabel Allende
Yeah, a chronicler.
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Alison Stewart
Chronicler. What could she do as a columnist that maybe she couldn't do as a straightforward reporter?
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Isabel Allende
Well, a straight. I mean, the reporter would get the news, the important news, and the idea was to present them in the most objective possible Way a chronicle was a piece of opinion, something that you could tackle it from an angle. And if you were good at it, you would develop a sort of personal voice that people would recognize. So even without your name in it, people would know that it was you and they would read that. And I had that experience when I was working in Chile as a journalist. I did a lot of things as a journalist, but I had one column that was a humorous column and people would recognize them voice always. So I was more or less known because of that column.
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Alison Stewart
Amelia is very sexually liberated. Why did you want to make her?
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Isabel Allende
She was very unusual at the time.
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Alison Stewart
Yes. Why did you want to make her sexually adventurous rather than stick to societal standards for the late 1800s?
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Isabel Allende
Because society's standards were so boring and so limiting and so awful for women, while men had all the freedom in the world. And she has a first lover, a man who really seduces her when she's very young and teaches her about her body, teaches her about pleasure, about freedom. And the message is, you can do whatever you want, just do it discreetly, don't make a fuss and be careful, don't get pregnant and don't get infected with something. So those lessons gave her a freedom that most women at the time did not have. Of course, they didn't have any sexual education of any kind. And she did not receive it either, because in spite of the fact that her stepfather was such a progressive and open minded person, sex was not something that was discussed, let alone with a girl. And her mother had been a nun. So go, go figure what kind of sexual education she would get at home. Just none.
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Alison Stewart
I was speaking with Isabel Allende. Her latest novel follows an intrepid reporter covering the Chilean civil war. It's called My Name is Amelia del Valle Most. The book takes place during the Chilean Civil War of 1891 and Amelia's coverage of it. How would you describe the two sides of this conflict for people who aren't familiar with it?
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Isabel Allende
There was a very progressive visionary president called Jose Manuel Balmaceda who wantedchile, had won the war against Peru and Bolivia and took a lot of territory from Peru, where all the rich mines were. So suddenly the country had a wave of wealth that had not had before. And the idea of the president was invest this wealth in making a great country. And the conservatives and the Congress, which was conservative, wanted to spend the money. It's there, let's spend it. Why worry about the poor? Why worry about education and welfare and health? Who cares? And so there was this confrontation of politics and ideology. And the armed forces split. The army went with the president and the Navy, which was very powerful in Chile because we have 3,000 miles of coast, went with the Congress. And we had a civil war which was bloody and brutal and terrible. More Chileans died in four months of battle than in the war against the four years of war against Peru and Bolivia. But what interested me, really, is that there are echoes of that event 80 years later, in 1973, when we had the military coup in Chile again. We had a progressive, visionary president called Salvador Allende who wanted to make big changes in the country within the constitution and within democracy. It faced terrible opposition from the conservative and the right wing. And half of the country, to say the truth, in this case, the armed forces did not split. The armed forces were against Allende and in both. And the result of that was a military coup and 17 years of military dictatorship. But what is also interesting is that both presidents committed suicide. So there's this parallel that you cannot ignore.
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Alison Stewart
I was wondering about you as you were writing this book, because of the parallel between the Chilean civil war and Salvador Allende and Punichet and the reason you had to leave Chile in the first place. Did it bring up anything for you? Did you bring up emotions for you writing this book?
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Isabel Allende
Not that kind of emotion. Not what you are thinking. Alison, I have written about what happened in Chile in many of my books. My first book, the House of the Spirits, and then the second, Book of Love and Shadows, is just about the terror of the dictatorship. So I have gone back to that many, many times. But here I wanted to focus just on the civil war. And because it is narrated, Emilia. Emilia cannot know what is going to happen in the future. So there is no reference to anything about the future except one little sentence which one person says. It says, hatred stays in a country, and it's under the surface, and any excuse will bring it forth to the surface.
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Alison Stewart
What I have under.
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Isabel Allende
You marked it.
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Alison Stewart
I marked that in my book.
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Isabel Allende
I can't quote it exactly, but if you can read the.
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Alison Stewart
Well, it was also about the United States Civil war. It says that's how it was in the United States. More men died in our civil war than all of the wars we've had. The country was left deeply wounded, and I'm not certain it will ever heal. Hate often lies dormant under the surface, only to sprout back up when given the correct circumstances.
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Isabel Allende
Exactly.
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Alison Stewart
That was fascinating to me.
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Isabel Allende
I've seen that. Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
Tell me more.
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Isabel Allende
Yeah, we have a sort of civilized deal, an Agreement between nations and within a nation, between political parties and people, that we will try to live in a civilized way. But if the wrong circumstances are there, then the worst of humanity comes forward. And we have the Nazis in Germany, the fascists in Spain and Italy. We have Pinochet in Chile, and anything can happen. And in this country right now, we are so polarized and there is so much hatred that is no longer under the surface. It's out there, and people have guns. I mean, this is just. We are on a minefield. Any minute, this can explode in a very bad way. And so that makes me very concerned, very fearful.
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Alison Stewart
How much license did you take? There are so many facts in the book. You can spend all your time on Google, going back and forth in the.
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Isabel Allende
Book, and you will check Google and see that it's correct.
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Alison Stewart
It is. It is. It's incredible. But I'm curious, how much creative license did you take when you're dealing with historical fact?
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Isabel Allende
Only with the characters, but all the foundation of the book, which is the historical event. I research carefully and I stick to the facts. For example, I have a conversation between Emilia, who is interviewing President Balmaceda. Most of what Balmaceda says in the interview is historical. There are documents, of course, in other contexts. He's talking in another context. But I could take sentences from his own speeches to have this dialogue with Emilia. The character of the journalist, for example, Leonardo, he existed. And also some of his reporting is in the book.
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Alison Stewart
So Emilia goes to Chile to cover the war, but she's also searching for her birth father. Perhaps she might have an inheritance coming her way, but she gets a lesson in class structure immediately along the way, right?
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Isabel Allende
As soon as she gets to Chile.
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Alison Stewart
What? Why is it important about who you are and where a person came from in Chile at this time?
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Isabel Allende
In Chile, at the time, in all of Latin America, in most of the world, except in countries like the United States, which is made of immigrants and people coming from everywhere. But in countries like Chile, which was at the time a very homogeneous population with common roots, let's say the European roots from Spain, Basque and Castilian, and few immigrants from other places, and the native people. Class is the equivalent of race in the United States, and they are shades of class, almost like in India. I grew up like that, so I can know from which class or subclass a person is just by the way that person walks, that person talks, the accent, the words, the chosen words. So you have to be born there and live there to understand it. And of course, Amelia has no Idea. She has grown up in the Missions district in San Francisco. But why was it important in the novel that her biological father is a Chilean aristocrat? Because when she goes back to Chile, she would never be able to connect with the president or with that father if he was not an aristocrat. The fact that she has the name del Valle, which her mother insists that she carry that surname, is because the mother somehow understands that it will open many doors. And that's what happens when she gets to Chile. She's immediately.
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Alison Stewart
She understands.
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Isabel Allende
Yeah, she immediately gets it. And she immediately realizes that the access that she has to the generals, to the president, to the politicians, is because she has that name.
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Alison Stewart
She does meet her father. Some call him a rake. That's as far as we'll go. We won't go any tell anybody anything else about the plot. But what does she get out of meeting him?
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Isabel Allende
Compassion. She meets her father when her father is dying. He's very ill. And she has come with a letter, a very hateful letter, from her mother to the father in which the mother demands reparation. She demands that her daughter or his daughter also guess what? She's entitled to have. So Emilia has this letter in her purse, and it weighs like a stone, like a rock. And when she sees that man who is trapped in the fear of death and the fear of hell, who regrets his life completely and who probably doesn't even remember that he has an illegitimate child in San Francisco, instead of feeling the hatred that her mother has instilled in her, she feels compassion and she opens her heart to this man. And I think that's the lesson that she learns there.
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Alison Stewart
I do want to point out that she falls in love in this book, as a woman.
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Isabel Allende
Well, there's always love in my books.
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Alison Stewart
That's what I was going to ask you. I mean, sometimes the book's about who we fall in love with, what we're willing to give up, what we doing right and wrong. What is it that you wanted to explore for what it takes for us to realize that we are in love?
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Isabel Allende
You know, she falls in love with a man who is a journalist that has traveled with her, but she also falls in love with the land. And she's pulled between these two loves. The love that Eric offers is romance and marriage and a life probably in which she will not have much adventure, because she will. She sees where the life of a wife and a mother is at her time. She's not sure she wants that. But also she feels pulled by the land that she has no connection, except that the father, except the biological connection. And she goes in a pilgrimage to the south of the south, looking for something that she doesn't know what it is. She's really looking for her soul. She has gone through an experience of death and everything changes. This 25 year old, adventurous, flirtatious woman that comes to see what's going on, she thinks that a battle is like a show. And then she finds herself in the blood and the violence and death and suffering in a field hospital. And after all that experience, she's broken, she's traumatized. And she goes to the south in search for understanding, for her own soul, to see who she is. What does she want? And it's interesting, Alison, because I had an ending for the book and the ending was that she's in a boat in the lake and it's very foggy and she just disappears in the fog. And my American editor, Jennifer Hershey, said, this is a metaphor for death. Does she die? And I said, no, she doesn't die. Well, make it clear, this is not a good ending. So we started juggling possible endings and then we finally came back. Between she, my husband and I came out with the epilogue.
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Alison Stewart
Isabel Allende will be discussing My name is Amelia de Valle tomorrow night at 7pm at Symphony Space. Thank you for making the time for being with us.
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Isabel Allende
Thanks so much, Alison. Thank you.
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Ira Flatow
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