Knowing that the two had had a very close relationship and got to exchange thousands of daily letters, some of Allende’s friends suggested that she wrote a book about her mother’s life. The original idea for the book arose after the death of Allende’s mother.

Allende goes through the almost centenarian life of a woman born to a conservative and wealthy Chilean family, a status that changes radically when the Great Depression leaves them homeless. by Ballantine, a Penguin Random House imprint, begins at the time Panchita was born, during the so-called Spanish flu of 1920, and ends at the time she died, during the coronavirus in 2020. So Violeta, the woman who says to her grandson that her life is worth telling not so much for her virtues as for her sins, is partly Allende’s mother, partly herself and “a lot of imagination.” “She takes all the chances, whether it’s her love life and the life she wants to lead … The difference is that my mom always depended financially on someone.” She was smart, visionary, talented, with good ideas to make money,” Allende, 79, says in an interview in Spanish from her home in California.

“Violeta, like my mother, was a person, a beautiful woman, that wasn’t very aware of her beauty. Throughout its almost 400 pages, it also reviews socialist movements, communism, military dictatorships in the Southern Cone and democracies. Set mainly in the Chilean Patagonia, with moments in Argentina, Miami and Norway, the novel deals with a wide range of themes, from feminism and verbal abuse, human rights violations and homosexuality, to amorous passions, infidelity and even global warming. WATCH: Isabel Allende on studying real people for characters in her novels Violeta, a strong woman who manages to overcome innumerable obstacles, gradually reveals details of her family and love life to her grandson Camilo, whom she has raised since the day he was born.

On Tuesday, the Chilean author published “Violeta”, a novel that begins and ends with an epidemic and that covers the last 100 years of history through the eyes of a grandmother inspired by her mom, Panchita, one of the women who marked her the most. MIAMI - Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic began, Isabel Allende suffered one of the greatest losses of her life: The death of her mother.

Isabel allende's daughter paula