6/22/2023 0 Comments Letters to paula isabel allende![]() ![]() ![]() If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world. ![]() Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. In Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do ( public library), which also gave us Mary Karr’s poignant answer, celebrated Chilean American author Isabel Allende offers one of the most poetic yet practical responses to the grand question.Īllende shares in Kurt Vonnegut’s insistence on rooting storytelling in personal experience and writes: For Charles Bukowski, it sprang from the soul like a rocket. Joy Williams found in it a gateway from the darkness to the light. For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. ![]() Joan Didion saw it as precious access to her own mind. For George Orwell, it resulted from four universal motives. Literary history is ripe with eloquent attempts to answer the ever-elusive question of why writers write. ![]()
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