The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir - Softcover

Allende, Isabel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061563102 ISBN 13: 9780061563102

Publisher: Harper Large Print, 2008

Synopsis

Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, tied together by the love, strong will, and stubborn determination of a beloved matriarch, the indomitable New York Times bestselling author of The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende.

"An inspiring and thought-provoking work." -Denver Post

Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory--and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.

About this title

Review:

"Allende is a genius."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A warm meditation on family and love...A book to be savored and reread."--Kirkus Reviews

"THE SUM OF OUR DAYS is terrific. It's funny, insightful, moving and filled with Allende's unique voice."--USA Today

"Allende's THE SUM OF OUR DAYS adds up to an exuberant love letter--not only to her daughter, but to her tribe and anyone lucky enough to belong to one."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A powerful memoir"--Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Allende's trademark magical realism is ever present...This high-spirited, emotionally packed book enables readers to get a closer look at the life of a much-loved writer."--Library Journal

"A vibrant voice, which is at once introspective and forthright...an inspiring and thought-provoking work...The insights resonate, on page after page."--Denver Post

"A deeply revealing memoir . . . Allende's insight is keen, her prose polished and her language hypnotic . . . This is a book to savor."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"...Ms.Allende...executes this epistolary memoir with the same authenticity and poetry that grace her fiction...Ms. Allende is a survivor worth reading and emulating."--Dallas Morning News

From the Author:

THE SUM OF OUR DAYS
Isabel Allende
The Sum of Our Days is the most difficult book I have written. It starts where Paula ends - in l993 - and covers the recent thirteen years of our family in California. It is a long conversation with the spirit of my daughter in which I tell her what has happened to her family since she died. It has been a rather eventful time, to say the least: success and losses, great love and just as much conflict, joy and separation, births and deaths, drugs, divorce, arranged marriages, all the stuff that usually happens to people, but one has to use cautiously in a novel. Melodrama is part of life but literary critics eviscerate the author when they find it in a book.

I met Willie Gordon in Northern California, on a book-tour in l987. We fell in love, got married and thus I became an immigrant in the United States. Immediately I started the process of adapting to a new country and putting together an extended family because I could not imagine a life without it. Willie's family was dysfunctional: three of his children had serious problems with drugs and the law, so they were practically out of the picture for many years. I convinced my son Nico and his wife, to move from Venezuela to California. They had three kids in four years, so I had my grandchildren at hand. Also my daughter Paula and her husband, Ernesto, who were in Spain, announced that they too wanted to live closer to us. Unfortunately Paula suffered a porphyria crisis in Madrid, fell in a coma and ended up with severe brain damage. By the time she finally arrived in our house, she was in a vegetative state. Within a year, both my daughter and Willie's daughter died. And then it was as if our family had been cursed with the evil eye; we had one tragedy after the other for what seemed like an eternity, until eventually our bad luck run its course and one day the sun was shining again for us. Not all was bad. We never lacked the really important stuff: love, trust and good humor. We even managed to expand our little tribe by "adopting" friends in the roles of aunts, uncles, and cousins. Now I have six grandchildren, although they are not all blood related.
In The Sum of the Days I had the kind of problems that I seldom encounter with a novel because it is a very personal story. Paula is also a personal memoir but it is mostly about people who are either deceased or far away, so few of them could complain, while the characters of The Sum of Our Days are alive and very close. As my son Nico says: too bad that we have a writer among us. My answer is that we have nothing to hide; we have not committed any major crime that I know of. We shouldn't feel vulnerable by revealing about our family, as I have done in Paula, The Sum of Our Days and innumerable interviews. It is not the truth that makes us vulnerable, but our secrets.

I suppose that I am a born liar and that's why I feel so comfortable writing fiction, where I create the story, and I shape the destinies of my characters. If I so desire, I can kill them on page 60 (and that is what usually happens to beautiful females in my books). My only problem with fiction is to make it believable. A memoir, however, is an attempt to tell the truth, and truth usually is less believable than fiction.
In a memoir I don't control the plot, the characters or the outcome, I can only decide the tone and what to omit, but for a storyteller that is not really a choice. Even at the risk of getting in trouble with the people I love the most, I have to tell the whole story. Then, why tackle a memoir? Because I need to remember. What I don't write it, I forget, and then it is as if it never happened; by writing about my life I can live twice. When I announced to my family that I was writing about all of us, there was an uproar among our ranks: why on earth! I quoted the fable of the toad and the scorpion. The toad carried the scorpion across the river and when they were reaching the other side the scorpion bit him. Before sinking, the toad asked why he had done it - they would both perish - and the scorpion replied: it's my nature, I can't help it. Writers write, it's their nature, so my unfortunate family has to put up with me.

Memory and imagination are similar processes in the brain; they are both subjective and unreliable. Fortunately, I have been writing letters to my mother for more than three decades, in which I tell her the events, the feelings, and even the dreams of every day. In those daily letters all is recorded with the spontaneous tone of a conversation in the kitchen. At the end of each year she returns them to me, and they are now stored in a closet in my house. To write The Sum of Our Days I did not have to stress my memory or my imagination, just open the packages and select what I was going to tell. I see my life in Technicolor, on a big screen, like an epic movie, so I had to write about the highlights and shadows, but I chose to ignore the boring grays in between.

Of course, my small family had to read the manuscript. Half of them don't speak Spanish, so Margaret Sayer Peden, who has worked with me for almost twenty-five years, translated it into English. One by one, the members of the family confronted me with their versions. In some cases it was long and painful but in every instance it helped me to deepen into the stories and discover new aspects of these people that I thought I knew so well. With their help I rewrote the book and this time I did a much better job.

The Sum of Our Days was published in Spanish in September of 2007 and since then I have received hundreds of email messages and letters from readers that now feel as part of my family. The response has been as moving as the one I got for Paula but in a different mood because this is not a book about death, it is a celebration of life. I hope that you will also feel connected to my tribe.

Isabel Allende

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Large Print
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0061563102
• ISBN 13: 9780061563102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528