Carolyn Hunter
The T. A. Barron Podcast.

T. A. Barron
Hi, Isabel.

Isabel Allende
How are you doing?

T. A. Barron
I’m fine, and how are you?

Isabel Allende
Good, thank you.

T. A. Barron
Are you well? Are you thriving? And most importantly, are you getting enough chocolate?

Isabel Allende
I’m getting enough chocolate and I’m still writing, so that’s good. What about you?

T. A. Barron
I know – I’ve just read a wonderful new book here called Violeta.

Isabel Allende
Violeta. Oh good, good.

T. A. Barron
I am doing well despite the fact the world is a ghastly mess. But I try to get out in nature. And fortunately, where we live, there’s lots of it. And for me, there’s nothing else in the world big enough to hold it all than Mother Nature. Well, Isabelle Allende is one of the world’s most beloved writers, storytellers, ever in history. Yes, you are, Isabelle.

Isabel Allende
Thank you.

T. A. Barron
And for excellent reasons. Life without your books would just be so much less rich and deep and full and inspiring and heartbreaking and true and funny and sexy.

Isabel Allende
Thank you. My God.

T. A. Barron
In every way, you’ve enriched all of our lives. And if I listed all your honors, honestly, it would take this entire podcast. So I’m just going to pick a few.

Isabel Allende
Just skip them. Skip them and let’s get to the conversation.

T. A. Barron
All right. It’s a deal.

Isabel Allende
Yeah.

T. A. Barron
Let me just say that, though, with all of your books and all of your honors and what, 70 or 80 million copies of your books out worldwide, what’s most important to me is not any of that. It’s that you are a deeply wise observer of humanity and our human condition. And having watched you over the years and listened to you, I feel even more thrilled about that because you’ve shown us ways to see ourselves. You have this wonderful x-ray vision about who we really are. And at the same time, you are a hilarious storyteller. We’re going to get to my favorite of your funny stories in a moment, and I will add you’re just a fabulous guide to chocolate. Having introduced me to the best cup, to the best hot chocolate in the world, as well as the Recchiuti chocolates in San Francisco.

Isabel Allende
Oh, you haven’t tried the ones that are filled with orange. They are to die for.

T. A. Barron
I’m going to order a box right after this conversation. Well, Isabel, I have been dying to ask you, your books are just so full of passion and joy and heartbreak. Why do you tell stories? What is it that compels you to share these wondrous, unforgettable stories?

Isabel Allende
This is the only thing I can do, Tom. Really. It’s the person I am. When we talk right now, I’m thinking of your story. So I think in terms of stories, everything for me is a story. Let’s say that we watch some car crash in the street. You will come home and say, well, we saw a car crash. For me, it’s a story. Who was in the car? Why? What happened? What was that person thinking? What will happen after. Maybe she borrowed the car and she will get in terrible trouble. That kind of stuff. My brain is just sick. It works that way!

T. A. Barron
It’s a good sickness. I know it’s a burden for you, too, because there’s nothing harder work than writing, but there’s also such beauty and joy in sharing and depth in telling the kind of stories you tell.

Isabel Allende
But also, Tom, I listen, and everybody has a story. Everybody has something to say that is wonderful and that if you share it, another person connects. And in the storytelling, there is connection.

T. A. Barron
That’s beautiful, isn’t it? To be part of that world of connecting through stories. But you’re honoring each person, no matter how invisible or disadvantaged or overlooked they might be in the world. They have a very powerful story. And so many of your books feature exactly those people, those incredible, incredible strong women, in particular, in all of the books, Clara and Alba and Transito Soto, of course, and then Eliza and Ines and Eva Luna, and now Violeta. And I’m just so thrilled. All of these are people whose stories are immensely powerful but may not have been told, ever, until you turned your listeners’ ear on them.

Isabel Allende
But those are the best stories. They’re stories of people who are not protected by the big umbrella of the establishment, who are the marginal, the unheard, the silenced voices. They have the wonderful stories. They’re the stories of survival, very often of forgiveness, of starting again and just put aside the grudges and the pain and the sorrow and just keep going. I am involved right now with a book that you have to read, and I’m going to send it to you, called Solito. And this book is written by Javier Zamora, a young 32-year-old man today, but he was a nine year old boy who crossed the border alone…

T. A. Barron
Wow.

Isabel Allende
When he was nine. And he was deported twice and finally reunited with his parents. He went to Harvard with a scholarship. This man is a wonderful writer. And that story, the story of a boy who is a total, marginalized, poor child from El Salvador that makes it in life, that’s the story I want, you know?

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
I don’t want the story of the privileged people who have everything.

T. A. Barron
No. And in fact, it’s those stories of people who really, truly start with nothing and climb their mountains are the ones that remind us truly of our own capacity for courage or compassion or perseverance, hope. All of those qualities.

Isabel Allende
You know, I think, really, Tom, that we don’t know who we are or what strengths we have until we are tested. And sooner or later, life tests you.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
And it’s happening probably right now to you, as it has happened to me. And then you realize who you are, what are your values? Can you live to those values? And that’s the moment when the moment of truth.

T. A. Barron
Right. And are they just spoken values, or are they real?

Isabel Allende
Exactly.

T. A. Barron
And if they are real, they will not only guide you, but they will deepen in the course of that difficult time.

Isabel Allende
And make you much stronger.

T. A. Barron
Yeah. Isabel, did you always, as a child, did you always love stories?

Isabel Allende
Yes. Well, I grew up reading. Remember, I’m 80, Tom.

T. A. Barron
No way, no chance!

Isabel Allende
Yes!

T. A. Barron
You’re just so wonderfully youthful in so many ways.

Isabel Allende
You know, I’m so proud to be 80. I’m so happy to be 80. But I was born in 1942 in the end of the world, in a very Catholic, patriarchal, authoritarian, male chauvinistic family where girls were supposed to be trained to be wives and somebody’s mother. So I grew up in a house where there was no television because television didn’t exist in Chile yet. My grandfather forbade the radio because it brought vulgar ideas to the house. We never went to the movies. That was, I mean, unthinkable. So I grew up reading. And stories – that filled my childhood and my youth.

T. A. Barron
And you inhaled those stories. And as you talk about in The Soul of a Woman, you also saw what was happening to your mother when your father disappeared and she was forced to fend for herself and raise all three of you. And provide, with no advantages, and, as you point out, no voice that could be heard in that society.

Isabel Allende
What I think that was the huge problem was that she could not support herself and that made her dependent on somebody else’s decisions or will or whatever. First her father, then her brother, then her first husband, then her second husband and finally me. And my mother was an extraordinary woman like Violeta in the book, but she could not support herself. So when I created the character of Violeta, I wanted to give my mother, because she’s inspired by my mother, I want to give her that, you know. The fact that from very young age, as I did, she’s economically independent and there is no feminism without that.

T. A. Barron
Marvelous. It’s so important. And I want to talk a bit later about your work in the charitable realm and the work you do for women and girls worldwide. But this is all reminding me of your famous quote, “If I haven’t written about it, I haven’t lived it.”

Isabel Allende
Yeah, I forget life. I forget life, Tom. I wrote a letter to my mother every single day for decades until she died. The last letter that we exchanged was the same day that she had the hemorrhage and she died. And so I have in my garage 24,000 letters between her letters and my letters for a lifetime of letters. And every day at the end of the day, I would write to my mom. And in a way, I would summarize the day not only what I did, but the intentions, the writing, the thoughts, the dreams, everything was in there. And so if you ask me today what happened, let’s say on July 15, 1987, I go to the garage, I take out the box of 1987, look for the date, and I can tell you exactly what happened that day so it’s not lost. And now I don’t have that.

T. A. Barron
I must ask you, do you still write to her in your heart?

Isabel Allende
I tried. After she died, I wrote to her for, like, two months, and then it was so artificial. It didn’t work.

T. A. Barron
It wasn’t real.

Isabel Allende
No, no. So, what I do now is that every morning I wake up really early, around 4:30, maybe 5:00 in the morning. And I have like, half an hour in which I just sit there with my cup of coffee and my two dogs in the darkness, being grateful and connecting with my mother, with Paula, with other people who are in my memory and in my heart. And that’s my beginning of the day.

T. A. Barron
We’re parallel in that way.

Isabel Allende
You do the same?

T. A. Barron
I do a gratitude blessing time every day.

Isabel Allende
At what time do you do it?

T. A. Barron
I do it not immediately when I wake up in the dark. I do it after breakfast, the first thing I do. I go outside, too. I feel the wind on my face, and I look up at the trees, whether they have leaves or not. And I just feel life in nature and life in myself. And it helps me. And I roll through in my mind the people in my life I’m so grateful for my wife, children, and the dear friends, and the opportunity to do meaningful work that seems to touch people. And all of those things I feel grateful for. And it puts me in a place of centeredness and gratitude for the rest of the day, even through the hardest parts of the day. It helps.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
I have to ask you. I remember so vividly, once, you described your writing process as lighting a candle and writing by that candlelight until it burns out. And whether or not you actually light a candle every day is not the point. It’s that that metaphor I felt was so beautiful because it was welcoming in the darkness and the light and the vulnerability and the transience of all of our lives. Do you still do that as you write?

Isabel Allende
I do that. The candle that I use now lasts for a week.

T. A. Barron
That would be a long stint at the writing table!

Isabel Allende
Yeah, it lasts at least a week because it comes in a pot. But I do light the candle because it’s my way of saying, come on, to the muse, to the inspiration, to light. I always think that a story hides in a dark room and I go in with my candle and I can illuminate parts of the room, a little corner here and there, and slowly the characters and the story emerges from the darkness. I mean, day by day, word by word, and that’s the way it happens. And I cannot do it any faster. I cannot control it, really. It has to happen in a very organic way. That’s why I don’t have a script. I start writing and I have no idea what I’m doing except when I’m writing a historical novel. And then I know the time and the place, nothing else. I don’t have the characters, I don’t have the story, but I have the theater where the characters will act.

T. A. Barron
So when Daughter of Fortune is set in early San Francisco, and of course, before that, the journey there, you knew the historical bookends of that.

Isabel Allende
Yeah, I knew the gold rush.

T. A. Barron
And you knew the gold rush, but the rest just flowed out of those dark rooms.

Isabel Allende
Absolutely. And sometimes, in the most unexpected way, the universe gives you something to get started or something that you can develop. For example, remember that I was going to write about the gold rush and I wanted to write from the point of view of a woman, but I didn’t want a prostitute, which was what was most common at the beginning of the gold rush in California. And also an immigrant, because immigrants were the first ones to be here.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
And I was thinking about this when, suddenly, I stumble upon the character of Joaquin Murieta, the bandit, the California bandit. And it said, like a footnote, that he was maybe a character that never existed, just a legend. And he would have been Mexican or Chilean. And I thought, wow, this is it. I have a Joaquin Murieta that is Chilean.

T. A. Barron
So was Eliza inspired, then, by…

Isabel Allende
So, how could I bring a girl to the gold rush if she doesn’t come for gold, and if she’s not a prostitute? She would come for love, only for love. And the harrowing trip that she does, it’s only because she’s so madly in love with this Joaquin that we don’t know if it’s Joaquin Murieta or not. I just got a letter yesterday from a young person, 27 years old, that says she has been obsessed to find…she has been obsessed for years because she needs to know if the head of Joaquin Murieta was what Eliza sees or not. Because at the end of the book, it’s an open ending. She comes, looks at the head, and the reader doesn’t know if she recognizes the head or not.

T. A. Barron
Right. You let the reader decide. All of us are in agony in that moment. You have to know you have inflicted great pain and agony on every one of us. Can I go back to the candle for a moment? Because what also strikes me about that tradition of yours is that you’re opening the door to the mystery of this process, the mystery of creativity, the mystery of storytelling. You’re inviting in those elements that we can’t even describe, that really make stories come alive and touch human hearts everywhere, in every language, in every culture. It’s beautiful.

Isabel Allende
Well, thank you. But as I said before, I listen to many stories and then in the process of writing, some of the stories come out of the woodwork. Some of the stories that I had no idea that I remembered suddenly come back and they become part of the story somehow.

T. A. Barron
Are these characters fully formed when they emerge from the shadows?

Isabel Allende
No. They are, I would say, in a mist. And slowly that mist or that fog clears, but it takes a process. Very seldom I see the character clearly. It happened with Island Beneath the Sea the slave Zarité in that book really came to me full-bodied. And I had nothing in common with that woman. And I saw her from her back, and she was dressed in white, a tall African woman with very short hair and a very long neck. And I saw her from behind and I knew her, suddenly. And I have looked for that name or for a character like that in real life because I had the impression, I thought, that she was like a visitation. That someone who had really lived, who came to me and said, “Tell my story.”

T. A. Barron
I know.

Isabel Allende
That sometimes happens. Seldom, unfortunately, but that happens.

T. A. Barron
Well, you really know and convey in your books that there are many different dimensions of reality.

Isabel Allende
Of reality.

T. A. Barron
To reality.

Isabel Allende
Yes.

T. A. Barron
And many of them we can never understand, but we can just experience a bit of their ambience or just a little whiff of, puff of breeze from one of them, but they’re there nonetheless.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
So, Isabel, how do you bring those characters fully to life? Is there a conversation that you have with them?

Isabel Allende
You know, I think that what really helps me is that I had a brief, but very intense, time in the theater. So I wrote theater plays for a company in Chile, in the seventies. And the first time I wrote a play, the actors sat around a table to read each one their part, and they all sounded like me. I mean, everybody sounded like me. So I felt so embarrassed, and I picked up all my papers, went back home and rewrote the whole thing by becoming the actor that reads it. So if I am, let’s say, a student, I have to talk like a student. I have to live like a student. I have to BE the student in order to create the character for the actor to play that role.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
So when I write, not with the secondary characters often, but at least with the protagonists, I have to BE them. Even if it’s the villain. If it’s the villain that is going to torture someone, I have to become that person and see why I’m doing it. What do I feel? What was my background? What was my childhood? What do I eat for breakfast? All that is part —

T. A. Barron
And where does this cruelty come from?

Isabel Allende
Where does it come from?

T. A. Barron
Find that.

Isabel Allende
Yeah. And I don’t have to like the character, but I have to be the character at a certain point. That helps a lot.

T. A. Barron
Well said. I have to ask you an impossible question. Do you have a favorite character across all of your stories?

Isabel Allende
You know, I always say it’s Clara, because she was my grandmother. But more and more, I like other female characters that are more assertive, that are more independent and stronger. Clara was a very spiritual creature, my grandmother was. But she was, first of all, dependent. She had never heard of feminism, of course, and she could live that ethereal life because she had a husband who supported every whim of hers. So now, for example, I prefer characters like Violeta because Violeta is a full woman of this time.

T. A. Barron
Yes. Or Eliza. Or Ines.

Isabel Allende
Yeah. Who fight for their lives.

T. A. Barron
Yes. And in the backdrop of these cataclysmic, world-changing events, too, how you bring all that together, I don’t know how you do that. That’s wizardry with words, in my view. But it’s so beautiful, so powerful.

Isabel Allende
Thank you.

T. A. Barron
There’s also a touch of that magical side in your books. And I know in your childhood, your grandmother, I believe, was able to be clairvoyant? And…

Isabel Allende
She tried.

T. A. Barron
Maybe she could also do telekinesis and move things on the table.

Isabel Allende
You know, my grandmother died when I was very young, but there is all kinds of legends about her. And I grew up listening to all these anecdotes that were very magical. So partly, the time that I shared with her, but mostly everything I have heard about her, created this character in my mind that was this magical grandmother. Who, for example, she would say that there are many dimensions of reality and the world is full of presences. The presences of everybody that lived before and will live in the future. Everything comes together in an eternal present. And that idea that we are surrounded by everything that happened and will happen is extraordinary. Because, first of all, it gives you a sense of fullness, of belonging to something much bigger than your own life and being in the universe, being like stardust.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
And that is wonderful. And then it takes away all the fear of death, the fear of sorrow, of pain, of all those things. They happen, of course, but you don’t fear them because you understand that you are just part of the wind. You are the wind.

T. A. Barron
Yes. I imagine it as a drop in the great blue sea of all living consciousness. You also, by telling stories, though, you open the way for us to imagine those places, those people that we may not see around us, but who are there.

Isabel Allende
Yeah. And often people have commented that when I describe a scene, they are there. And that’s another trick, Tom. The trick is that I always think of five senses. So let’s say that I am describing the forest. It’s not what I see. It’s what I smell, what my skin feels, what I hear, what I touch. It’s all the senses involved. And I think I got that from the One Thousand and One Nights that I read when I was a teenager, the idea that we are sensory creatures, we are in the world with our senses. And so, when I describe a scene in a book, I try to go to all those places. Let’s say they are having tea. I need to know what kind of tea. Yeah, that’s right.

T. A. Barron
That’s right. And then you have to smell it.

Isabel Allende
I have to smell the tea.

T. A. Barron
And taste it. And remember what memories it conjures up to have that smell. You just reminded me of one of my most favorite book events ever, ever, was one where you and I did a panel together at Book Passage, that wonderful independent bookstore outside of San Francisco. And we did it in the midst of a travel writers conference, do you remember?

Isabel Allende
Yes, I remember.

T. A. Barron
But we did it about traveling to imaginary places. And I’m not sure if the travel writers who were there in the room –

Isabel Allende
Were sort of shocked.

T. A. Barron
Yeah. I think they were like, what are they talking about? Are we in the Amazon or are we in New York City or where are we? But you and I were off on…

Isabel Allende
Yeah, we had fun.

T. A. Barron
Magical journeys. That was so much fun. You also told me I should shave my beard, that I was growing that summer.

Isabel Allende
Yeah, because you have such a beautiful face. Why would you hide it behind a beard? That’s crazy. Yeah.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
In this moment of our conversation, I would like to turn, with your permission, from fiction to nonfiction. And I have to start with what, to me is the most sad and powerful, and at the same time uplifting book I’ve ever read, which is Paula.

Isabel Allende
Thank you.

T. A. Barron
Inside my copy of the book, I have one of your beautiful fabric cards from Chile that you wrote me when you sent me the book. And you wrote, “Paula is a book that saved me from depression and forced me to go inside myself and draw strength from my roots, my past, and the love that I have always had in my life. Love, Isabel” with one of your beautiful flower drawings at the bottom. Now, could you please tell us a bit about the book and the origins and the meaning that it gave to you?

Isabel Allende
Well, the book… what happened is that my daughter, Paula had a condition called porphyria that should not be fatal, but she had a porphyria attack in Spain. She went to the hospital, they gave her the wrong medication. She fell in a coma. They didn’t monitor the coma, and she ended up with severe brain damage in a coma. And they hid it. They hid what had happened in the hospital for five months that I lived in the hospital waiting for her to wake up. When finally they admitted she would never wake up, I managed to bring her all the way from Spain to California. This was before 9/11. And I brought her in a United commercial flight. I took several seats in first class and I brought a nurse and I brought all the equipment she needed. Ended up with a connection in Washington. Can you believe it?

T. A. Barron
Wow.

Isabel Allende
And then I brought her here, and I took care of her at home until she died. Now, the book really started in the hospital in Madrid during those five months because I was expecting her to wake up. And people had told me that people who are in a coma for a long time usually have lapses of memory. Sometimes they don’t remember anything. So I started writing to remind her who she was and from where she came and who was I and her country and everything else.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
And so I took notes in a notebook during that time. And then I wrote letters to my mother in Chile. When I brought her to California, I knew already that she was never going to wake up. So I stopped writing to her and I wrote to my mother. At the end of the year, December 2, when she died, my mother gave me back all the letters that I had sent her and she said, “Read them. They are in chronological order. So you will understand that death was the only way out for Paula.”

This happened in December. And I start on my book on January eighth. So on January eighth, I took all those letters plus the notes that I have taken, and I started writing, writing, really with tears, a book that I didn’t intend to be published. It was just a memoir of the sorrow and in the process, Tom, of writing that book, I could organize the events. Because for me, the whole year was a black night. The only thing that I remember clearly was the trip bringing her from Madrid, nothing else. So by reading the letters and remembering stage by stage what had happened, I could organize it in my brain. And in a way, I could frame this, that this pain that occupied all my being, I could contain it in a box, the box of the book. And see that around me my grandchildren were being born. Life went on. I had a husband. I had a dog. Life kept happening, and the world kept happening also. And so, in that sense, the book helped me enormously.

When I finished the book, as I told you in that card, I felt that I had been supported by the love of the people that helped me through this whole thing. And then her husband and my parents read the book, Paula’s husband, and they said, let’s see if this should be published. Paula would like this to be published. Let me tell you, that book was published 30 years ago. And I get letters about it every week. Every week there’s someone new who is reading it. Sometimes it’s a very young person. I get letters, like, for example, a young person that says I haven’t talked to my mother for eight years. I read your book, and I called her. That kind of letter.

T. A. Barron
What power in that.

Isabel Allende
You know what? It’s even the shared sorrow, Tom. When we go through something horrible, our tendency is to close down, and we close down. But if we open up and let all the pain come through and share it, something miraculous happens. You become stronger. People connect with you. People feel stronger because they know that they are not alone in their own pain. So I think that I learned a lot with that experience.

T. A. Barron
A memoir can be not only deeply moving and inspiring for the readers, it can be a kind of therapy for the writer.

Isabel Allende
A catharsis. Yes. For me it was. Yes, it was.

T. A. Barron
That’s part of what stirs me about the book and why I’ve read it several times is because you start at a place of such devastation, but you find your way, ultimately, to a more powerful and stable, wiser, deeper, stronger place. Let me just read to you one of the opening lines in that first chapter you’re writing to Paula. I can imagine you sitting by her bedside there in that hospital. “Since you fell ill, I have had no strength for anything but you, Paula. You have been sleeping for a month now. I don’t know how to reach you. I call and I call, but your name is lost in the nooks and crannies of this hospital. My soul is choking and saddened. Sadness is a sterile desert. I don’t know how to pray. I cannot string together two thoughts, much less immerse myself in creating a new book. I plunge into these pages in an irrational attempt to overcome my terror.”

Thank you for having the courage to write this.

Isabel Allende
Thank you for letting it touch your heart, Tom. You know what, Tom? Sometimes we cannot escape. There is no way out. You have to live it. Just go through the pain. And that’s the way it is. And we are so terrified of suffering. We are terrified of pain. But there is something very cleansing in pain.

T. A. Barron
Right. It’s true. And you have to walk all the way through it, though, don’t you? You can’t try to go around it, over it, or ignore it, because then it’ll come back even more so and worse. This is like someone at the end of a long tunnel out there holding a lamp. I can see that lantern out there. So, thank you.

Isabel Allende
So maybe this is a time for you to write a memoir.

T. A. Barron
Maybe it is. I love you so much, Isabel, and I’m going to take to heart what you’ve just said, because I’ve been thinking about that, that perhaps this is the time.

[Music Plays]

T. A. Barron
Well, now I want to turn to a different kind of autobiography, but a more joyful one, I must say. Your book, Aphrodite, also described as “A Memoir of the Senses.”

Isabel Allende
Well, that’s the task I gave myself after years of being in a writer’s block, I gave myself a task to write something very different from what I had experienced with Paula. And this is a book about lust and gluttony, the only deadly sins that are worth the trouble.

[Laughter]

T. A. Barron
You must share with my podcast listeners the story about Antonio Banderas, which I think is one of the funniest, most hilarious stories ever told, ever. Please tell us.

Isabel Allende
Well, I had a dream, and that triggered the book, actually. I had a dream that I placed a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, I slathered him with guacamole and salsa, rolled him up and ate him. And so, since then, I have had an obsession with Antonio Banderas.

T. A. Barron
I love that you ate him at the end. And you also, at some point in the book, you talk about a dream of diving into a swimming pool completely filled with rice pudding.

Isabel Allende
I love rice pudding almost as much as chocolate. And I remember that was my comfort food when Paula was in the hospital in Madrid. So the idea of plunging into a swimming pool of rice pudding is fantastic. Can you feel the rice pudding, the little grains in your skin, the sweetness of it?

T. A. Barron
Soft and creamy all over you everywhere, filling your mouth, everything. I’m just… it’s stunning how powerful that image is! Well, this book has not only stories like that, but it has some fabulous recipes and all kinds of facts that I had never known about different kinds of fruits and spices and the history of them as aphrodisiacs and marvelous recipes.

Isabel Allende
Well, don’t follow the recipes because they are not really aphrodisiacs. They don’t work. If you need an aphrodisiac, take Viagra, because really, it’s easier than cooking all the stuff that I recommend in the book.

T. A. Barron
Fortunately, I have the best aphrodisiac, which is —

Isabel Allende
Love.

T. A. Barron
An absolutely wonderful, loving mate in Currie. By the way, she would come up here and totally look at me in horror if she knew I had just said that, and thousands and thousands of people might hear it, but it’s true. I am a very lucky person to be married to this wonderful gal. And she puts up with me.

Isabel Allende
You put up with her. It’s mutual. Usually, it’s mutual.

T. A. Barron
That’s true!

Isabel, before we wind up, and you’ve been so generous with your precious time, I do want to ask you to tell us a bit about your marvelous charitable work through your foundation to help women and girls around the world.

Isabel Allende
Well, after Paula died, I decided to create this foundation to honor her. And the mission of the foundation is to invest in the power of women and girls in the areas of education. And that includes getting a skill so that you can work. Health, which includes, also, reproductive rights. And protection from violence and exploitation, because most women all over the world are exploited or abused. And so we work with people of high risk, the most vulnerable, usually the poorest, any immigrants and refugees, and the stories I get are fabulous. The book that I will publish in June is based in one of those stories. So I get back such an incredible treasure of lives that I can touch and that I can learn from. The person who runs the foundation is my daughter in law, who does a fabulous job. So she’s always in a plane. She just came back from India. Before, she had been in Fiji and Nepal, and now she’s going to Kenya. So she supervises the projects that we finance. And without a person like Lori, I couldn’t possibly do the work we do. You need someone that is like a saint, totally dedicated to this.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
But it works fabulously, and I am very grateful that we can do that.

T. A. Barron
I feel the same about our foundation for heroic young people. And I’m blessed with one person, a former elementary school teacher who’s totally that saint, and she’s dedicated. Her name is Barbara Ann, and it makes it all happen. But there are very few ways, I think, to lift the world as powerful as helping girls and women, on whatever continent, or young people, wherever they are, so that they can remember that they do have power and they can then not just help themselves, but these girls, these young people, they go help their communities.

Isabel Allende
Absolutely.

T. A. Barron
Their countries.

Isabel Allende
It has been proven that every cent that you invest in women comes back multiplied. Because women, when they get any kind of help, they invest it completely in the family. For example, in a poor community, they will buy two goats, and from the two goats, they will have four goats. And then they will come out of extreme poverty. And if the family comes out of extreme poverty, usually the community eventually does, the village, and then the nation. The most backward and poorest nations in the world are where women are put down. That’s happening today in Afghanistan, for example, where the situation is dire. I mean, it’s just awful. And women are less than cattle. On the other hand, women educated and connected among themselves becomes such a powerful, strong political element that can change a country also.

T. A. Barron
Yes.

Isabel Allende
Look, I tell Lori sometimes, Lori, I’m so discouraged because what we can do is like a drop of water in a desert of need. And Lori always says, It’s not about numbers. It’s about the person you can touch and whose life you can change. And that’s enough.

T. A. Barron
That’s the best we can do.

Isabel Allende
That’s the best you can do.

T. A. Barron
And Lori’s right. And bless her for saying that. It’s so important to do what we can, while we can, however small it may seem in the scale of the problems.

Isabel Allende
Yeah.

T. A. Barron
Isabel, I have so delighted, every single millisecond of talking with you.

Isabel Allende
Thank you, Tom. It’s been wonderful to see you also.

T. A. Barron
I really want to thank you and congratulate you on 80 fabulous years. And let us hope another 80 to come. And I really want to say to all of my listeners out there, I passionately urge you to check out the books of Isabel Allende. Visit them and you will be thrilled and uplifted and moved and devastated and inspired and fall down in fits of laughter. And then you’ll want to visit again and again. They’re that special. Thank you, dear Isabel.

Isabel Allende
Thank you, Tom, and good luck to you.

T. A. Barron
Thank you.

T. A. Barron
To everyone out there. Let me just say thank you so much for joining us for Magic & Mountains. We’ll see you next week. And in the meantime, may you have magical days.

Carolyn Hunter
We hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of Magic & Mountains: The T. A. Barron Podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a five-star review, and share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information and to find all of T. A.’s books, visit tabarron.com.