Isabel Allende (Essay Date 1989)

SOURCE: Allende, Isabel. "Writing as an Act of Hope." In Paths of Resistance: The Art and Craft of the Political Novel, edited by William Zinsser, pp. 39-63. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

In the following essay, Allende discusses her reasons for writing, the lessons she hopes her novels teach, and the marginality that women writers face.

In every interview during the last few years I encountered two questions that forced me to define myself as a writer and as a human being: Why do I write? And who do I write for? Tonight I will try to answer those questions.

In 1981, in Caracas, I put a sheet of paper in my typewriter and wrote the first sentence of The House of the Spirits: "Barabbas came to us by sea." At that moment I didn't know why I was doing it, or for whom. In...