Talk Easy with Sam FragosoTalk Easy Presents Author Isabel Allende on ‘Wiser Than Me’
This week, on the heels of our live show with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, we’re presenting a special conversation from her podcast Wiser Than Me.
The episode features award-winning author Isabel Allende (The Wind Knows My Name). They discuss motherhood, falling in love again in her seventies, an influential piece of advice by writer Elizabeth Gilbert, and how Allende remains present in her life and work.
Find more episodes of Wiser Than Me through Lemonada Media.
To hear Julia on Talk Easy, listen here. The episode is also available to watch on YouTube. Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at sf@talkeasypod.com.
Pushkin.
Hey everyone, it's Sam. Last week on the program, we released one of my favorite episodes of twenty twenty four, featuring the one and only Julia Louis Dreyfuss. That conversation was taped in front of a live audience at the Aspen Ideas Fest in Colorado, and if you haven't listened to it yet, we've included links to both the audio and video versions. You can actually watch this one. In the description of this episode, it is a profoundly heartfelt, funny, insightful conversation about her life and career, from Julia's beginnings at SNL to all She's learned on the sets of Seinfeld, Veep and her most recent film, Tuesday from A twenty four. We also spoke a little bit about the origin of her new podcast, Wiser Than Me. The show first launched in collaboration with Lemonada Media in the spring of twenty twenty three. It's this really unique and moving project where Julia hands the mic to a series of wise older women who share everything they've learned in their seventies and eighties and even nineties. Some of the people she's hosted on the show include icons like Julie Andrews, Debbie Allen, Jane Fonda, and the subject of today's episode, the award winning author Isabelle Allende. I wanted to share this specific back and forth because it's one that I don't know. It's really stayed with me since I heard it last year. They talk about motherhood, falling in love again later in life, and a piece of advice from writer and Talk Easy favorite Elizabeth Gilbert that continues to inspire Allende and her work. If you enjoy this sampling, you can find more episodes of Wiser than Me wherever you were listening to this right now. We will be back next week with a brand new episode of Talk Easy featuring writer Taffy Brotesser Ackner. But until then, I'm going to turn it over to the one and only Julia Louis Dreyfuss.
From nineteen eighty two to nineteen eighty five, I had the privilege of being on Saturday Night Live, and there was one sketch that I did in which I played Christina Doloorian, the wife of John Dolorian who I guess he invented the Dolorean car and he had some big cocaine scandal at the time. I mean, could there be anything more eighties than that? Anyway, for this scene, the hair and makeup people gave me a blowout. You know, they straightened my hair because Christina Dolrian had straight hair and I had really, really curly hair. And the scene was you know, funny or whatever. Probably not. I think my husband Brad might have played John Delorian, but it doesn't matter. That's not what I'm talking about. What matters here is that it was the first time I had ever had straight hair in a sketch. Usually it was just my own curly hair or a wig. Right. So, the Monday after the show aired, when we came back to work at thirty Rock, one of the very big bosses called me into his office and he sat me down specifically to tell me that he really liked how I had done my hair in the John DeLorean sketch. And then he tells me that he had gotten a call from somebody at NBC saying that at least five NBC executives wanted to and I quote, fuck me because they thought my hair looked so good. Ah, lucky me. He actually prefaced the whole thing by saying, I've got good news. Yeah, he did. Even now, as I'm telling you this, I'm speechless. I didn't know what to do. I started laughing, in fact, and that's really all I remember. But it stayed with me, and I didn't change my hair. But for the rest of my entire three year run there, they kept trying to get me too. A couple of years later, I'd already been on Seinfeld for a while and this same producer came up to me at some NBC event. I hadn't seen him in like ages, and he goes, hey, holes, because that's what he called me. He goes holes. I see they're letting you do your hair the way you want. And I'm thinking to myself, and I see you're still clueless. Now. I cannot in good conscience, honestly, I cannot stand by my big wall of hair that kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger on Seinfeld, that truly does not stand the test of time. And I want to apologize to all watchers of that show for that look. But I can and do stand by doing whatever the fuck I want to do with my hair and my body and my brain, no matter what the men in the room have to say about it, which should be by the way, nothing back then the implied powerlessness of women in the workplace was just the expected norm. Early in my career, getting producer credit when I was in fact producing a show was like squeezing water from a stone. And look, I know, I am lucky, but even for me in my ohso privileged show business sphere, that imbalance has been in place in various forms for my entire career. So many years later, when I first heard about the show Veep, a series about a female vice president who was unhappy, a bitter, angry, thwarted female politician, this rang so true to me. And even though Selina Meyer was out of her pee pick in mind, because you know, let's face it, she's really a villain. Her struggle I identified with, and her self hatred I identified with her hatred of other women and of her own femininity made a lot of sense to me because it's real and it comes from somewhere that feels so familiar. I really truly love leaning into that part of Selena. I love being a woman, and I totally understand how being a woman can keep you from your goal and keep your ambitions restrained. I understand why being a woman for Selena was so hard and so goddamn funny. Selena even says at one point she said, I can't identify myself as a woman. People can't know that. Men hate that, and women who hate women hate that, which I believe is most women. By the way, there's a little Selena Meyer performance for you. The power of women and the powerlessness of women and how we hold those two things together at the same time is very interesting to me. And today I'm talking to a woman who's writing so thoughtfully examines these themes of womanhood. Isabelle Allende. Hi, I'm Julia Louis Dreyfuss, and this is Wiser than Me, a show where each week I get schooled by women who are wiser than me. So you're a six year old little girl in Santiago, Chili, right after World War two, and you're going to a little confidence school with nuns and everything, and for some reason they kick you out. So here you are, just six years old, and you wonder, maybe through tears, what the heck is going to become of me? Do you think if you were a kid in that situation, even a kid with an absolutely wild imagination, do you think you'd imagine that you'd grow up to sell seventy seven million books, be translated into eight zillion languages, and be the first internationally successful female South American writer. You would if you were Isabellillende. If I had to say only a few words to describe Isabelliende's writing, they would probably be, oh, my God. She writes these sweeping, multi generational stories about grief and sorrow, rage and displacement, power and sex and ghosts, and much of it is inspired by episodes from history or from her own absolutely fascinating life. And she doesn't stop with just the writing. She was a feminist long before the term was invented. In fact, she says she knew she was a feminist before she could even utter a word. She's the founder of the Isabelleyande Foundation and recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not bad for a little girl who got kicked out of a convent. So if you're ready for some serious inspiration, maybe some killer writing tips. Did I mention she's also a renowned teacher and maybe a little magic in your realism, then you're in the right place. Please welcome a woman who is way wiser than me. Isabelle allende, Julia, I am not wiser than you.
Yes, you are stretch of the imagination.
I guarantee that you are.
No.
No, I pretend a lot, I lie a lot so that you get the wrong impression.
So you're a faker.
Yeah, of course, well.
I guess to a certain extent. We're all fakers, right, I mean we have to sort of fake our way through certain situations. By the way, are you comfortable if we say you're real? Age?
Of course, I'm eighty. I'm so proud of being eighty, Julia. I should be. I'm so proud.
You should be proud. It's so gorgeous. You are so gorgeous.
Oh thank you.
How old you feel? Do you feel eighty?
Look when I compare myself to my husband, who is six months younger than me, So let's say that he's eighty. I feel that he's eighty and I'm not because I can still run up the stairs, and I can touch my toes, and I jump out of bed, and I work eighteen hours a day and I'm fine. So probably because I'm healthy, but also because I have a purpose and I have a very good life. I'm very happy. Oh god, that's I'm so happy, Julia. Really, I'm so happy to be alive. I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to be looking through my window right now. I live very close to a lagoon, and I see the ducks and the geese and it's fantastic.
What do you think the best part about being your ages.
That you don't have to please anybody?
Oh?
Yeah, only the people you love and the people you care for, but not the world, not everybody else. You don't have to follow anybody's lead. You don't have to follow fashion or nothing. If I try to look good, it's because it pleases me, not because I'm trying to please anybody else.
I don't care. Really, did you arrive at this place that you're describing later in your life? Because I get the sense this is a little bit who you are.
No. I think that it has taken me years to get to this freedom, this absolute freedom that I feel now. But because during my youth and my mature years, I was trying to prove something. I was trying to do something to become someone. You know, everything, raising kids, having a marriage or a divorce or excit, all the things that I have gone through were like tests that I had to I had to go through, and now I feel that I don't have to. I know that the final test will be real old age, being ancient, when you are dependent and then deaf. That's going to be the final test. But right now I'm in this wonderful period in which I don't feel tested.
God, I cannot wait to be Eddie.
I'm telling you that right now, you guys start right now, I can't.
You're really really selling it well? For real? Can we talk about feminism? Because first and foremost I have to say and you're writing. I was saying this earlier before we have this conversation, and was talking to my producers, and I was saying, what's so extraordinary to me about your writing is that your feminism is baked into the writing. It's in the fabric of the writing. When you're not talking about it, it's there. And I love that. What was the moment you realized you weren't treated the same as men. Was there a moment because you said you were feminist when you were a little girl? What was that?
I think I realized very early on that my mother wasn't treated like the men in the family. It wasn't so much about me because I was a child, But very early on I saw my mother. I wouldn't say as a victim, because a victim is someone who can't get away from a situation. And maybe she could have been able to get away. Yeah, but my mother didn't have any money, any power of decision of any kind, any freedom. My father had abandoned her with three kids, so she another marriage, and she became a single mother with three kids in a country with no divorce. So she went to live with my grandfather, and she was totally dependent. She couldn't make a living. She had to depend on other people to support the kids. She had a roof over her head, schooling for the kids, everything that was the basic was there, but nothing else because in a way, society and probably the family punished her for divorcing, for making the wrong decision, for marrying against her parents' will, for all the mistakes that she could have made. And she was so young, so young. My mom was twenty when she married, twenty four when she was alone with three kids, one of them newly born. My father never met that kid. Wow, my youngest brother.
And did you feel that your mom recognized the sort of injustice and the culture. Was she aware of it, or you just witnessed it.
I witnessed it, and I don't think she recognized the injustice, but she recognized her dependency and her poverty of resources. She had to ask for everything. You know. Recently I published a book called Violeta and that was after my mother died. Because many people said that I had such a fantastic, unique relationship with my mom that I could write about her, and she was also a fascinating character. But I couldn't. I couldn't write exactly about her. But I created a character that would be like my mother, even physically like my mother, but with one difference. My character can support herself, and therefore she has a life that my mother didn't have because she depended first of the father, then the husband, then the second husband, then me, etc. She could never be herself fully.
Was this something you were able to talk about with her.
Later in life. Yes. My mom was scared of feminism, my feminism, because she thought that I would get a lot of aggression. And at the time when I was preaching against the patriarchy, I was fourteen fifteen years old. No one was talking like that. I mean, I was a lunatic, and my mother was scared. She thought that there was something wrong with me, that I would never be able to grab a husband or have a life, because who would want me?
You know.
Plus she thought that I would get and I have gotten a lot of aggression for that, because I belonged to the transition generation. That we were the bridge between my mother's values and the way she was brought up and the new wave of young feminists that were changing the world. But we were in between because we were raised like our mothers and we had to act like our daughters.
But you know, it's funny because I think, even even today, you know, to say that my experience instance, when I say yes, I'm a feminist, I don't really say that very much. I behave like it, I live my life like it, but I shy away from the word, which something I guess should be explored. I don't really know why that is because.
You don't need it. You don't need it, Julia, because you belong to a generation in a country where you don't need to say it. It's just there. But imagine my life sixty years ago in Chile.
That's right, you.
Had to say it. My mother would say, yes, yes, I understand you can't do everything but do it quietly, no need to make a fuss. And I would say, mother, how can you have a revolution without a fuss, without making noise? Right, it's impossible. You have to really articulate say things so that people will acknowledge that that's a problem.
That's right. So speaking of motherhood, well, first of all, you said, I don't know if you wrote her. You said in an interview, you said, your mother, who has since passed, but your mother was ahead of you, twenty years ahead of you, and she was showing you the way, which really struck me because, first of all, it's very much sort of the notion of what this podcast is about, show us the way. Can you talk about that a little bit about your relationship with your mother.
My mom and I lived separated most of our lives. She was married to a diplomat. So when I was fifteen, I was living with my grandfather in Chile and my mother was in Turkey, and we started writing letters to each other every day. Of course, the mail would take a month or two sometimes, so it was not a dialogue. It was just an ongoing keeping a diary thing, hoogue, and we kept that habit of writing to each other every day all our lives. In the garage of my office, I have twenty four thousand letters. And I'm not kidding, Julia. It's my letters and my mother's letters that I have collected only in the since nineteen eighty seven, because I don't have the other letters. I know everything about my mother. We shared our lives. She knew less about me than I knew about her because she was much more open than I was, partly because I didn't want to hurt her. Many times. Oh, she had no modesty with me in any sense. She could talk about money, about sex, about relationships, about her ailments, about everything. She would say, my miseries.
Was any of that inappropriate? Or was it all appropriate?
Inappropriate? Most of it? That's why I can never share those letters.
Oh, I see a lot of it.
You could not share with anybody.
Wow.
And the confidentiality of it made it so extraordinary. And of course there was a lot of domestic stuff and little stuff, but also the big issues were there. So I knew my mother saw so well. And when I say, she was showing me the way many times, the showing of the way was what I would not do, because she had done.
Yes, and would she say as much, don't do this, or you would come to that conclusion.
No, my mother would say do it. Because my mother was a lady and she wanted she wanted me to be a bit like her. Well, there was a point when I had success with my books and I got some recognition that my mother sort of started seeing me under a different light. And then she acknowledged that what I had done was valuable and it was a better life than hers. So at the end of her life, in the last ten fifteen years, we could talk about that, and she often said that she wasted so much time that she was so scared. She regretted that she could not explore fully her talent for painting, for example, she was always copying instead of trying to express herself. I think that she got fed up with the idea of being the perfect housewife and spouse and the wife of a diplomat. And yeah, it didn't pay off, you know, And she thought that my life was so much better in spite of the of the losses and the risks.
Was she a good writer, yes.
Excellent writer, and she would be my editor at the beginning when I didn't have anybody else. She would read my books, and often she couldn't editing the way a good editor does, you know, but she could say she could make it look more beautiful, read more beautifully by choosing another adjective, an unusual noun. But also sometimes she would say, you know what, I don't like the ending, and she couldn't say why. But if she didn't like it, I knew there was something wrong with it.
Oh wow, amazing. You learned a lot about writing from her. Yeah, from everything about her, I would think. I mean, it was the first, the first real critical relationship in your life, right with your mom.
And very critical because she didn't like any any of my writing until she read the reviews.
Oh that's a shame.
She didn't like anything.
My father was very critical of what I did as well. Yeah, he was, and it was kind of gutting because I revered him so tremendously and he was incredibly opinionated and very often right.
What did you do with your father?
Oh? Well, my father had an interesting life because he was a businessman. He was in the commodities business, but in fact he was a poet. He was the head of the Poetry Society of the East and was published but he was incredibly intelligent, and he had a law degree, and he was charismatic, and I don't know. He was somebody whose opinion I valued, and when we butted heads it was pretty brutal. But it seems like you know people like that in your life. I think, to a certain extent, you need them, and then you also have to figure out a way not to need them, or to need them the way that works for you best, right, which is what it sounds like it was with your moms. Do you go back and read them or you let them be?
No, I've never read them. I have only read some of the letters when I have written a memoir, because every single day of my life is in those letters. So if you ask me what happened July seven, nineteen ninety six, I can go to the garage, take nineteen ninety six books out and find the day and I can tell you what happened that day. So for a memoir, it's very useful. But I don't read them. It makes me sort of sad to know that it's there and I will never receive another letter. When she died, I kept on writing to her for a couple of months. Yes, every day and then it became something very artificial. I couldn't do it anymore.
But you have talked about how you in the morning, you have your time, you wake up early. I don't know if this is still the case. You wake up early and you have your time with your mom and your daughter Palla, who's passed, and you have time with them. Is that in your head? Do you talk if you don't mind talking about that.
Well, I don't see ghosts and I don't talk aloud, so I'm not completely crazy. But we have a king sized bed and two dogs. In the morning I get I wake up around half past four, yeah, sometimes five o'clock, and I have half an hour at least, if not an hour to sit in my bed in the darkness, accompanied by these creatures. I love my husband and the two dogs, and be grateful. Remember think of who I am and where I am, what am I doing? And when I say I talk to my mother because often I have questions, and some of the questions are for my mother, some of the questions are for Paula, some of my grandfather, some of my stepfather, because I know what they would answer. I know, for example, I know that if I have some issue with one of my grandchildren. And I'm unhappy about something, I would call Paula, and Paula would say, Mom, what is the most generous thing to do.
In this case?
I know the answer. And if I call my mother, I know what she would say, or my stepfather. So that's when when I say that I talk to them, that's what I mean, and I remember them. I am surrounded by their photographs.
And what was like a question that you asked today, for example, or yesterday? Does anything come to mind today?
I read an article in The New Yorker about marriage, and it's about a philosopher, a woman philosopher who is happily married with two children, and she falls in love with a student and decides that she pianna analysis this from a philosophical point of view, and decides that she has to follow her heart. So she ends her marriage with another philosopher and gets together with this younger man. And so there's a long, long piece about what relationships are all about. And this morning I was thinking about my mother's marriage and about how unhappy it was. My mother was married for sixty five years with my stepfather, and it began like an incredible passion, but they had very little in common really, and at the end of their lives, I think they were disgusted with each other, really really, Yeah. So I was thinking of me at eighty with my husband at eighty and this new relationship because we have been married for a very short time, and thinking how do I tackle this? And at my age, it's more about patience, tolerance, understanding, good humor, good manners are very important, respecting each other's space.
But what was the question then, what was the question that you.
My question this morning was is my marriage working? Could it be better? How are we doing? So trying to think about it without analyzing it too much from an intellectual point of view, trying to feel it from the heart more. And it's hard, Julia, because life gets in the way, you know, Yeah, totally, yeah, And at our age there, for example, Roger has been sick, he had surgery. It took him a long time to recover. So for a while I felt trapped taking care of someone I'm not good at it. And then thank god, he's now much better. He's going to university, he's studying, he's doing stuff, and so I see him coming back to life, and I am so pleased that that's the case, because how long would I have loved him, really if he was not the person I married. I married him three years ago and everything changed very very soon. First of all, the pandemic hit and I was locked. We were locked in a small house with two dogs and we couldn't go anywhere. Oh my god, working on zoom.
Well, it's really a blessing. You still like him?
I love him, I really love him. I asked myself today, why do I love him? Who attracted me of him when I met him? Kindness, kindness, and a person who is completely transparent. You don't have to guess anything. He's totally the person you see. That's what you will get.
How did you meet him?
He heard me on the radio, and then he wrote to my foundation and I answered every first message of a reader, so I answered as I always do. And then he wrote again, and he started writing to me every morning and every evening for five months, and I wrote back sometimes, and then eventually I had to go to a planned parenthood thing in New York. He worked in Manhattan, so we met and he invited me out for lunch, and I said, look, what are your intentions? Because I'm seventy four years old, and I don't have any time to waste. Well, he choked on the ravioli, but he didn't panic, and two days later he proposed. He said, let's get married. I said, you're kidding. We can be lovers, but I'm not going to get married. But he lived in New York and I live in California. So he had to take a plane and come to visit for a weekend. It was not comfortable, and after a year or so he moved. He moved to California. He sold his house. He was a widower, gave away everything he owned and moved to my house with two bikes, a few clothes, and for some reason, some crystal glasses. Go figure, why the glasses? I still have them?
Ask him why? I don't know.
He just brought the glasses. So we started living in this small house for a while, and he always brought up the idea of marriage, and I always said, it's not necessary. We're not going to have kids. Why are we going to get married? Right?
I agree with you about that. I'm curious to why why? But what's his argument?
For him? It was important because he had been married in a wonderful marriage for forty eight years with a fantastic human being, his wife, Grace. And I think that for him, the idea of marriage was full commitment. And I don't project, I don't give the impression that I will commit to anything except my writing, because I am always like temporary here or temporary there. And he felt maybe insecure, I don't know. But what really tipped the balance was that once his granddaughter, Anna, who was seven at the time, went to the librarian in her school and said, miss have you heard of Isabela Jende? And the librarian said, yeah, yeah, I think I read a couple of her books. And then there was this pause and the child said, she's sleeping with my grandfather away really really, and.
That was it. You walk down the aisle at that Pointyeah.
At that point we said, okay, let's get married. This is a bad example for their kids.
That is hilarious. God, that makes me laugh. My conversation with Isabelle Allende continues in just a moment, and believe me, you won't want to miss a single word of what she has to say. Let's talk about motherhood and what they don't tell us about motherhood, because you've talked about how it can be very boring but also very thrilling, and I'm curious about that, and I want to share my experience too. I have two sons at age thirty and twenty five, and motherhood has absolutely not been in so many ways what I thought it would be. And I mean that positively, but in the beginning I found it very shocking, and I definitely was completely whacked by postpartum, particularly with my first son, and I remember thinking when he was born, it was like you didn't realize what motherhood was until you had a child, and it was like, all of a sudden, there's this whole other part of life and the world that you didn't know existed, that was ongoing that you had no idea about. Like there was a huge wall and you didn't even know the wall was there. And on the other side of the wall is this whole new way to live your life, which on the one hand is very exciting, on the other hand positively terrifying. I remember my father in law was at the house and our son, Henry, had just been born, and he was talking, going on and on about I don't know what, just something's a little bit mundane, maybe telling stories about his life and as he's talking. In my mind, I'm thinking, how can you all be talking like this, as if my life hasn't been just completely upended. And I burst into tears because in the middle of him talking about some college stories, so you can imagine they thought I had gone completely out of my mind. But there was this feeling of great shame about that too, and that's I guess, really what I want to talk about is the feeling there's a sense that you're not allowed to feel that way. Can you talk about that in your experience?
Well, I wasn't terrified of at the idea of being a mother, but something happened that it's hard to explain. All my life before I became a mother, I was lonely. I was profoundly lonely. I was a child that was I think I was a smart kid, the only girl among boys and uncles and grandfather all male, Always feeling unseen, always having the feeling that if my mother something happened to my mother and my mother was sick all the time, I would end up in an orphanage so that I didn't have anybody. And the message I got from my grandfather's mostly who was a great person, but this was my family was don't ask for anything because you won't get it, fend for yourself, don't whine, don't cry, be strong, perform. That was the constant message and great loneliness. And then I fell in love, but I never now that I look back. I fell in love with the idea of getting married and having kids and the idea of love. But I don't think I admired or respected much that man, who was a very good person, by the way. But I knew that I was s Mardyer, that I was more capable, more hard working, that I was more organized, that I could do much more than he could, that he was like a child that I had to bring along. And then Paula was born, and for the first time in my life, I felt that I was never going to be alone again, that I was I had this person in my life that I would take care of for the rest of my life. Yes, and it was thrilling. It was something extraordinary. And then when my son was born, I felt that the three of us were a unity, like a table with three legs. Yeah, we were to.
Get a table with three legs in houses spirits, by the way.
A table three legs and husbands could come and go, exile could happen, whatever, But we were together, and amazingly, you just saw my son. My son is fifty something, fifty three, fifty six, I don't even remember. He's with me all the time. We work together, we live together, not we don't live together, but very close, twelve minutes away, as I did with Paula. So really, the table with the three legs stay on stands. It's incredible.
By the way, just to clarify, because if my boys are listening to this podcast, I don't want them to think that I was hysterically unhappy when either of them were.
No, but you were stressed out.
I mean I was stressed.
It's a terribly stressful situation. And nobody tells you about it.
Nobody talks about it.
And now we live in a country where you're supposed to have many children if you don't want them.
Yeah, I know, tell me, Oh my god, don't get me going there. Yeah, but you talked about two at a time in your life as a mom where you did take off for a period of time.
Yeah, I abandoned my children, abandoned them. I abandoned them. And if you ask me, what is the thing I regret the most in my life. That's it. I fell in love. I was we were living in Venezuela. After the military Queen Chile, we had to leave, and we were living in Venezuela. My husband found a job in the other end of the country, in another province, and I was alone in Karakas with the kids, and I fell in love with an Argentinian musician. He moved to Spain and I followed him and I left. Well, my parents were living in the same building, but I left my kids and I went to Spain with this man. And a month later, when I realized I could never get my kids back, my husband was never going to allow it, I returned. My husband picked me up at the airport. I came in a very early flight in the morning back from Spain, and he picked me up at the airport and he said, everything that happened was my fault because I neglected you. I wasn't paying attention you told me, and I didn't believe it, So all is my fault. We were never going to talk about this again.
By the way, was that true?
Yes, in a way, but I cannot blame him. He was not to blame it. Was me. I was impatient. I was alone. I was terribly frustrated. I couldn't find a job. Everything that I had done in Chile was meaningless in Venezuela, and we didn't have any money. I didn't know anybody, so the situation was dire in many ways. But I cannot blame him because he was working, he was doing what he was supposed to be doing, and I was supposed to be taking care of the family, and instead I fell in love with somebody else. So when I returned, my husband went back to his work, and I tried to make up with my children, who had felt abandoned, especially Paula, who was fifteen years old, and she was furious, absolutely furious, and my son Nico was depressed. When I left, he had an accident, broke an arm, and then he didn't want to eat. So I came back to a very bad situation, and it took years for the kids to want or accept to talk about it, because they never wanted to talk about what had happened, although I tried to bring it up because I think that there are certain things that you better talk about. You cannot just leave them there in the darkness. Festering. No, and so eventually I think they forgave me, but I hurt them badly.
And have you forgiven yourself? No?
Really no, Because I understand that I was another person. Then we change a lot, Julia, in our lives. I mean, life shapes us. And the person I was at thirty five is not the same that was holding my daughter when she was dying and I was fifty, or the person I am today at eighty. It's like reincarnations. And I try to be gentle to the person I was then and understand. But the idea that I hurt my kids, it's very hard to live with us.
Yeah, yeah, did you go to therapy with your kids? No?
I went to therapy with my husband and alone many times, that first husband, you mean, yeah, And I lived with him nine more years, trying to trying to fix the marriage, and it was broken. It was broken. And after all those years, we were together for twenty nine years, and the last nine years was a huge effort, I think on his part as well, to be again a couple. But we had I think we had never been a good couple before. We just had been together, sustained, supported by the crutches of society, and when we left all those crutches behind, when we went into exile, everything fell apart.
And your son, Nico is he married.
He's married, and he's very happily married. And my daughter in law runs my foundation and she's my best friend and we work all together.
Oh my god, what a fabulous thing to hear. And you have grandchildren.
I have three grandchildren who are now adults, and they had of course, one is thirty two, the other one is thirty, the other one is twenty nine.
I think, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Yeah.
And they have their lives and they communicate with me, one of them more than the other two. But I don't miss them. You know, one thing that happens, no one thing. I'm sorry to say that this.
I love, I love, I love your understand them.
But I don't miss them. Because when you reach this time in life, you let go of a lot of things. So that is the great freedom to let go, first of all, of all the material stuff. If my house burns to ashes tomorrow, as long as I can get the dogs out, I don't care.
Okay, Look I need you to come to my house and clean it.
Out, clean it up. Well, my house was very little in it, and whatever.
You some of my check because I got I mean, if my house burns down, I'm gonna cry and cry and cry.
Why Julia you are You are going to die and you are not going to take anything with you, so who cares?
Yeah, you're right, you're right. No, I hear you, I hear you. Yeah, I think you're right.
And then to get rid of all the relationships that are not worth keeping. That some of them are really toxic but others are just boring. Right to let go of ambition, of greed, of trying to do or be someone. You let go of everything, and then eventually you let go of your grandchildren, not because you are going to abandon them, but because it doesn't hurt you. If they don't call you for your eightieth birthday, doesn't matter when it's your birthday. August second, Okay, I'm a Leo.
What are you capricorn? I'm January thirteenth. Yeah, that makes sense.
I don't know any astrology.
You said, but you were yeah, yeah, like you knew what I was talking about.
I used to do horoscopes at a certain time in my life, but it was just faking the whole thing.
You know.
I worked in a magazine, in this women's magazine, and we had a horoscope. Every magazine had a horoscope then, right, I mean I think still and the astrologer lived in Peru and this magazine was published in Chile. So one day I went to the director of the magazine and I said, look, I have the the February horoscope, but I don't have the January. And she said, oh, it doesn't matter, just put the February in January. So I said, look, if that's how this works, I can't do it. Why So that's fun.
So you got to sort of be fasible and start. Yeah, exactly.
Cour So I found out what signs my friends were and I would write the horoscopes for them.
But you are very spiritual person. Are you a religious person or you a spiritual No?
No, I'm not religious at all. And I am very skeptical of the word spiritual because in the name of being spiritual, people are really abusive sometimes.
Well, but explain how you identify with I don't know what do you want to call it? Then if we don't use the word spiritual.
I think that I'm aware that the world is a very mysterious place, and that many things. There's a lot of most stuff we can't explain, and most stuff we can't control. And we are just part of a chain, part of nature, part of everything that is alive. And when I die, I will go back to some other form, like I don't know, fertiliza for the ground or something. I don't believe in heaven. I don't believe that there is a god watching what I do and that is going to punish me. But I do believe that there is organic justice. Whever I do, I will have to pay for the good and the bad. So I'm very careful. I stepped carefully. I don't want to hurt anybody.
Do you have a death sort of plan? Have you thought that through?
No, I haven't thought much about it, but I've talked with my son about it. I don't want to be kept alive beyond the natural time, no artificial life if possible. I don't want to die in pain. I want to die knowing that I'm dying conscious and living my death to the very end, because I think it's an extraordinary experience. I know I held in my arms my daughter when she died. She was in a comma, so she was not aware. But then I held my mother when she died, and she was totally aware. At one point she asked me, am I dying And I said yes, mam, are you afraid? And she said no, I am curious, and I am content.
Oh my God, what a blessing.
What a blessing. And she died in my arms. And then three months later my stepfather died in my arms. And we were best friends, he and I and he was terrified of death, absolutely terrified, screaming in terror. So when I compare those experiences, I see that my mother was prepared. She prepared herself for that point. My mother was religious in the sense that she had been brought up Catholic, and she would listen to the Mass on TV on Sundays, but she was not fanatic at all. But somehow she had an idea of the soul. She prepared herself. My stepfather was a social being, a diplomat, a civil servant, someone who lived a very gregarious pur and in the last years of his life, when all his friends had died, even his children had died, he was alone and he was scared of everything and the purpose of his life, which was this gregarious life ended and the last years were very sad.
I had the experience of being with my father when he passed away, and he died at home. First of all, it's a complete gift to be with a loved.
One when they pass absolutely.
And in a weird way this might sound strange, but in a weird way, it reminded me of waiting for somebody to.
Give birth exactly.
And we were there just all like frankly in the bed, lying next to him, and when it came time to go, he was ready to go, which I was surprised by actually, because he was a fighter and he kept saying, let's get this show on the road, you know. But he has been certainly. He died. I don't know how many years ago. It's been two thousand and six, so five eight years ago now, But he's with me all the time. And I'll tell, are you clairvoyant? Do you have any sort of are you? Do you get signs or things like that?
Very few I do, but feel not like my grandmother, who was totally magical.
She was for real.
Yeah, but what you are saying, Julia reminded me that when that my daughter died at home. Also Paula, and she died in a large family room that we sort of created a sort of hospital there for her, and it was a very long night. She died finally around three o'clock in the morning, and we were all there with her, and there was this sense that something mysterious and sacred was happening, and it was like a stillness in the air. Stillness is the only way that I can describe it, like waiting and not waiting, like just everything was like a photograph, not moving. And then a few months later, my granddaughter Nicole was born and I was there with her. When she was born. I took her out of her mother and cut the umbilical cord. And when the process of the mother walking the corridor and then the effort of giving birth and the long time and then the coming and the stillness in the room, that's that sacred moment when when when that happens, It was it was very similar to the moment when Paula died. And I remember I was holding this little baby and I said, it came out of my gut. I said, tell me, tell me how it is before you forget. Because I had the feeling that she was coming from the same place that Baula was going to.
Oh god, that totally makes me cry. I love it. I had this experience. Sorry, I'm choked up by that, but I had this experience that was really bizarre. But I took it to heart. Which was the year, like to the day after my father died. Two things happened. One, I won an Emmy for the show VP I was doing. And I got diagnosed with breast can wow. Yeah, within a twenty four hour period. Yeah. And it was like at in nowhere.
Man.
It was really scary. I mean, cancer is scary. Period.
How are you doing now?
I'm fine, Thank you so much? Oh good, good, Yeah, I'm fine. But my father, his whole life, he used to drink. He had a favorite drink, diet peach snapple.
Oh awful.
I know, I'm sure that's the worst, right, It's utterly disgusting. And if he came to visit, I had to make sure to have it on hand and not all the stories sold it and we'd have to go around trying to locate it. And he drank it incessantly. God, I'm so fucking crazy, but anyway, he was. And so after I got diagnosed, I was immediately scrambling, of course, to get a team of doctors together to figure out who they were going to be. I interviewed a bunch of docs and I finally found this one oncologist with whom I who had come highly recommended. And I was sitting in her office with her, talking with her about my particular kind of cancer. And as I'm talking to her, I noticed on her desk diet peach snapple.
No way, Yeah, it's like a sign. That's a sign.
And I thought I'm gonna be okay.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, And that's something. Yeah, I see signs like that.
Yeah, I see signs like that too. I mean, I don't mean to sound like a lunatic. It sounds like I'm a lunatic yacking on a podcast.
No, no, But but if we pay attention to everything that happens around us, there are signs, right, there are signs. You know, Roger's wife, Grace loved ladybugs, and it has happened often that when they are talking about her, there's a ladybug. And they are not so common. You don't see ladybugs all over the place. It's not like flies, right, And yet you have to think, maybe we are interpreting it as a sign. But it makes us conscious of the mystery, the mysterious dimension of the universe.
And even if it isn't a sign, which I would like to believe that it is, Even if it isn't, to think of it as a sign, it's okay.
It's comforting.
Comforting, yeah, And as you say, it is an affirmation of the mystery of life. And we can all agree on that. Yes, yeah, very mysterious. There's more with Isabel Allende coming up after this short break. So, my god, we've talked for so long and I haven't even talked to you about your writing. Oh, I haven't even talked about your beautiful writing. You're so prolific, and you, obviously I'm stating the obvious. You say that your writing is not a product of discipline, but that you have to do it right. So can you talk about your process.
I am very disciplined. I am very disciplined, but because I was trained to be since symphons, yeah, and to really work, and also because I love it right, I love the research. I love I can't be sitting down twelve hours in front of a computer creating a story and then when I get up. I can't even move, but I don't feel the time passing because it's so I'm so engaged, so involved, so entertained, so happy. So when I hear those writers that say that the torment of writing, the torture of the blank pace, well, don't do it. Then why are you doing it?
Yeah? Walk away from it?
You know what I get asked all the time, some advice for young authors, no for aspiring authors. And the best advice I heard it from Elizabeth Gilbert. She said to an audience who someone asked in the audience the same question, and she said, don't expect your writing to give you fame or money, right, because you love the process, right, And that's the whole point.
Love the process, that's the point. And by the way, apply that to any passion. Yeah, any passion.
What you do right now, you are loving it, loving it absolutely, So you love the process.
Yeah, yeah, totally. Has your approach to writing or how has your approach to writing evolved since you were young, since you were say twenty five or thirty?
I started writing at forty, Oh at forty you started? Yeah? I wrote The House of the Spirits at thirty nine. It was published when I was forty.
Well, except you were writing before as a journal.
As a journalist, but it's very different, I mean very different.
Well, so since you were forty, how has that process evolved, if in fact it has, or is it sort of remained a constant.
When I wrote The House of the Spirits, I had no idea what I was doing. I had no plan, I had no script, I had nothing. I just sat down and told the story of my family. Yes, of course I changed the names and I fictionalized it, but all those characters are my relatives. With a family like that, you don't need to invent anything.
Right, As you were talking about your stepdad, I was thinking of Esteban and Clara.
But that would be more my grandfather and my grandmother. My grandmother was just like Clara, and my stepfather was not an assassin, and he was not a rapist like in the book, but the character, the personality, was very much like him. I wrote with innocence and with the spontaneity that I could never have again. After the first book was a success, and then after that I realized that there was a world out there, the book industry, that I had never imagined. It existed, Editors, agents, publishers, marketing, publicity, distribution. I didn't know anything about it, and so when I wrote my first novel, I had the freedom that I never had again. But in time, I think that I have acquired experience. Now I know how to research. I know what I will use of the research, and what it's just for my information but shouldn't be in the book. I know how to edit and correct and cut. I am merciless cutting. Before I would fall in love with a paragraph, and even if it didn't fit there, or even if that scene was too much, I would leave it in the book because I love it had taken me so long to write it. Now I don't care whatever time it takes. It's what it takes, and it will go.
That's funny because that's something that is very present in my life too, just as a producer. And if I go into the edit, you have to be really quite willing to sort of kill your darlings, just get rid of them. It does take experience to really recognize that and not be in love with yeah. Yeah.
And then the other thing. I know now after forty years and twenty eight books, that I can only write about what I'm passionate about. Once I gave my self a subject, but really, I have to feel in my gut that this is something I need to tell. And if I don't have that feeling of being passionate about the subject that I'm tackling, it's a chore and I cannot do it. The only time that I gave myself a subject and wrote about it was after Paula died. I went into a writer's block, like for three years, and I would try to write, and everything that came out was so flat, so dead, that it was just impossible to get around it in a way. Then I remembered that I am a journalist by training, and if you give me a subject and time to research, I can write about almost anything. So I gave myself a subject that would be as removed from death and pain and sorrow and lass and illness and death as possible. And I decided to write about lust and gluttony. The only deadly scenes that I wrote the trouble and so.
Trouble.
So I wrote a book that is the connection between lust and gluttony and those that's aphrodisiacs. And that's what the book is about.
Wow. And the name of the book is aphrodisiacs.
Aphrodite is the name of the book Aphrodite, and it is about aphrodisiacs and about how the polygamous culture is studied in China Persia, where the emperor or the king would have many concubines and would have to produce many children because the well being of the nation was reflected in all these children that the emperor could have, and so it was very important to perform. And of course you can perform to a sex and certain extent only. And the idea that food or herbs or different combinations of things could make the man more potent. That was the origin of aphrodisix. They don't work, by the way. The only thing that works is viagra.
Do you feel sexy now? Yeah?
Do I feel? I've never had asked myself that question in many years, but yeah, yeah I do.
Yeah I do. Do you like to have sex?
Yes?
Have sex changed for you as you've gotten older?
Of course, of course it has changed. And also I have an eighty year old husband.
Right.
Yeah, we're not spring chickens.
Here, right, But you still enjoy sex?
Yeah? I enjoy sex with marijuana especially Ah, sorry, but it's legal here in California, so I can't tell you.
Yeah, why are you apologizing? I think that's fantastic.
So I get I get these blueberries that have marijuana, and I take my blueberry, and it's much better than without it, partly because I get in a space which I forget the book that I'm writing, which is always inside my head. I always have one book inside my head, so when I take Mary one, I forget about the book. So sex is much better.
But wait a minute, just to be clear, because I'm going to go get myself some of those blueberries.
I can send you some, Yeah.
Send me some. But I mean it's like a blueberry gummy. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, it's a blueberry covered with chocolate, very small, like a blueberry, small blueberry, and it has Marie one. I don't know if it's in the chocolate or in the blueberry. I don't know. And then I eat that thing, and forty five minutes later I'm like another person. And then after that I can sleep fifteen hours. So it's perfect. I should have it every night.
I gotta get off this back. I gotta go down to Medman and find that for myself. Does your husband take it too?
No, no, he doesn't because he says he has a hangover. I gave him once one and he didn't feel good about it. I think that, you know what, he was raised by the Jesuits, and I think that I think that he has something inside his brain but like a prejudice against this.
God. I just love this, so listen let me. I'm so happy to have this tip about the chocolate blueberry. Is there something you go back and tell yourself at twenty one? Isabelle?
Yeah, calm down, calm down, for God's sake. You don't have to do everything. You don't have to do so much. Give yourself some time. Be more compassionate with yourself. I was merciless with myself, demanding, and I cheated my as. I would never treat anybody else wow, and I would say, stop it, that's not worth it.
Is there something you would go back and say yes to that you said no to?
I think that I never really learned to have fun in the way that other people have fun, that let yourself go and get drunk and dance and flirt. And I wasn't like that at all.
I was.
Really very straight. I dressed like a hippie. I was completely bohemian looking, and I was this outrageous feminist. I had a TV program that was outrageous too, and always with humor and doing crazy stuff. But my life was so rigorous. I was a mom, and I was a daughter and a granddaughter and a wife, and and always performing and always doing my duty. And I everybody around me in the seventies was doing drugs. I never did any any at all, and I didn't drink.
But look at you now, Well, now.
It's just the blueberry once in a while. It isn't every night either.
So is there something you would like me to know about aging that you haven't told me already?
Yes, that you need to have good health and aging. To have to have a good old age, you have to prepare for it. It doesn't just happen, the same way that you will have good skin if you take care of your skin, otherwise it won't happen. You have to prepare for everything intellectually, your your domestic life, the way the way you live, the way you think, the way you eat, your relationships. All that you have to prepare. Don't think it will happen just by chance. And other people who are totally mean and horrible think that they will have a good old die. Why would you have a good old age if you are a bastard? Why would you? Yeah?
Right completely?
Why would you be loved if you have not loved? Why would you be taken care of? If you have never taken care of anybody, if you have never given anything, if you are not generous, why would you have a good old life. It's not going to happen.
Generosity giving, that's the avenue.
And it makes you so happy.
It makes you happy.
It comes back to you multiplied by a thousand.
Mm hmm. Well, this has been a dream and a half to talk with you.
I suppose I suppose you edit all the bad words.
Yes, but you didn't say anything bad, did you?
You did? You're talking about fucking stuff.
Oh that's a bell that's staying in.
OK.
That's the way I talk.
That's the way. That's the way I talk to.
I cannot thank you enough for taking so much time out of your day to have this conversation with me. I feel I feel very honored and blessed to have had it. And I hope our paths cross. I hope that perhaps when I come up north, I could grab a cup of coffee or something. Yes, of course, I would love that.
I would love to meet you person.
I would like to do the same. God, what a treat. I'm just so happy.
I am thank you, thank you. I'm happy too. You're wonderful. You are absolutely wonderful.
Thank you, thank you.
I'm going to talk with your kids, with your man, with them, ajuana, with everything else.
Yeah, thank you. I love all those tips. Love it. Okay, kiss to you, Okay, bye bye. Well that was just about the most astonishing conversation I have had my entire life. I have to call my mom. I got to tell her about it. I love How are you? Mom? I wish you could have been with me for this entire conversation with Isabel Allende.
You know, when I heard that you were going to do her, I was like, like, there are some people I would be speechless in front of I think I would have been speechless.
Mommy. Well, first of all, you wouldn't have been speechless because she is incredibly warm hearted and opens up very easily in a way without airs. She is just present and real, So you would not have been speechless. She would have brought out the best in you, for sure, because she is an extraordinary human being. I mean, I really cannot get over this conversation.
I'm spokena. I just wanted to you want to hear every word that she said.
First of all, you know, she had this extraordinary relationship with her mother. She has mom twenty four thousand letters, all stored chronologically, year by year in a space of the correspondence between her and her mother. She and her mother wrote letters back and forth every single day.
Oh extraordinary, Yes.
Wow, it is extraordinary. So you better start writing me a letter or something.
Well, you know, when you went to college, I got a file, yeah, and it was for Joya's letters, and I wrote to you the beginning, and I wrote to you and nothing ever came of it. And then finally you had your birthday, which would have been the you know, the January of your freshman year. Wrote the letter then, saying how wonderful it had been and how fallen, and they had a surprise party for you and Joe. I read it to you. I gave it to you on your sixtieth birthday because it was so rare, and I saved it in my little while.
The one single letter, yes, yes.
One single letter. And so I decided that there was not going to be much exchange.
He probably.
I wish I had done that. I would give anything to have known, you know, day by day when you were little, and when your sisters were little, and all the things they did and said. And I mean it would have been priceless.
But who doesn't go who doesn't? Well, Isabelle does, and her mom did. She's eighty now, and she said the best thing about being eighty is that she doesn't have to please anyone except those that she loves, and she only looks good if it pleases her. And she went on and on about it in such a way that I thought, sign me up for eighty. She did. Really, it was incredible. But that's beautiful. She feels freed from certain obligations that she used to be burdened by. Do you feel that way at all or not?
Really?
Oh?
I do?
I do.
Yes, it's a wonderful thing. I quite agree with her. I probably am not quite as free as maybe she is. But there is a definite frame feeling because you can see through it. You can see through how stupid it is to put on, you know, lipstick, to go to the local store. I mean, you know, there was a woman, and we used to live and she used to get hers dressed up to take out the trash, and I just thank to myself. That's the most pitiful thing. I mean, you saw her. She put on a high heeeled shoes to take the trash out.
But there was nobody there.
I mean, it wasn't as if.
But mom, she may have been enlightened because she might have been doing it to please herself.
Well, now you've got it, because I never did ask her the question. She was sort of famous in the neighborhood for being the trash.
She should have gone up to her and say, are you doing this for yourself or are you trying to impress us? Because if it's us, it ain't working. Yes, all right, mommy, I love you so much.
I love you so much, honey, and I will talk to you and thanks for doing this. I'm so happy you're doing it.
I'm so proud and proud.
Oh my god, it's so good.
Thank you, mommy. Thanks, and I'll try to write you more often. There's more Wiser than Me. With Lemonada Premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content. Subscribe now in Apple Podcasts. Wiser than Me is the production of Lemonada Media, created and hosted by me Julia Louis Dreyfuss, is produced by Chrissy Peas, Alex Mcohen and Oha Lopez. Brad Hall is a consulting producer. Our senior editor is Tracy Clayton. Rachel Neil is our senior director of New Content, and our VP of Weekly Production is Steve Nelson. Executive producers are Stephanie Whittles, Wax, Jessica Cordova, Kramer, Paula Kaplan and Me. The show is mixed by Katyure and Johnny Vince Evans and music by Henry Hall, who you can also find on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music. Special thanks to Charlotte Christmin Cohen, Ivan kriev and Keegan Zemma and of course my mother Judith Bowles. Follow Wiser than Me wherever you get your podcasts, and hey, if there's an old lady in your life, listen up.
