Reflecting on her historic career, Allende identified the trait that all of her characters share: They're prone to making interesting decisions-not necessarily good ones. They are all around,' Allende, 78, says in a video created by her U.S. 'Those strong women? I don't make them up.

She's best known for her tales of strong (and occasionally supernatural) women, including the famous Truebas of The House of the Spirits. With 24 books that have sold over 70 million copies, Allende is considered the most widely-read Spanish language author alive. Throughout her decades-spanning career as a writer, Allende has been working her own kind of magic-of the storytelling variety, of course.

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Only a writer of Allende's passion and skill could share her tragedy with her readers and leave them exhilarated and grateful. The climactic scenes of Paula's death in the rambling old house by the Pacific Ocean seem to take place in another time and space. Eventually, hope waning, Allende and her son-in-law take the comatose Paula to California, where the author lives with her second husband. Allende later married-and divorced-an undemanding and loyal man and became a fierce feminist, rebelling against the constraints of traditional Latin American society. Allende explores her relationship with her own mother, documented in the hundreds of letters they exchanged since she left home. She writes of her own Chilean childhood, the violent death of her uncle, Salvador Allende, and the family's flight to Venezuela from the oppressive Pinochet regime. Her mother, as she watched by Paula's bedside, began to write this book, driven by a desperation to communicate with her unconscious daughter. In 1991, while living in Madrid with her husband, Paula was felled by porphyria, a rare blood disease, and, despite endless care by her mother and husband, lapsed into an irreversible coma.

A magician with words, Allende makes this grim scenario into a wondrous encounter with the innermost sorrows and joys of another human being. Writing nonfiction for the first time, she interweaves the story of her own life with the slow dying of her 28-year-old daughter, Paula.

Allende is a mesmerizing novelist (The House of the Spirits The Stories of Eva Luna) who here takes on a double challenge.

Isabel allende's daughter paula