In her agonized self-questioning after she finally concedes defeat and surrenders her daughter to death, Isabel strips to her core in the presence of her brother Juan, who has become a priest:.

She was survived by her husband, Ernesto Diaz, and other family members. The novel includes accounts both of Paula's treatment and of Allende's life, sometimes overlapping with the content of Allende's first novel, The House of the Spirits. Allende started the book as a letter to Paula, explaining what she was missing so she would not be confused when she recovered. Isabel Allende wrote Paula while tending to her daughter, Paula Frías Allende, who was in a coma arising from complications of porphyria.

But the book is a tribute to her deceased daughter Paula Frías Allende, who fell into a porphyria-induced coma in 1991 and never recovered. She intended to write a straightforward narrative about the darkest experience of her own life.

The story she tells is that of her own life, her family history and the tragedy of her nation, Chile, in the years leading up to Pinochet's brutal military coup.īorn in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of nine novels, including Inès of My Soul,Daughter of Fortune, andPortrait in Sepia.She has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children's novels.Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have become bestsellers across four continents.In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Paula is a 1994 memoir by Isabel Allende. Faced with the loss of her child, Isabel Allende turned to storytelling, to sustain her own spirit and to convey to her daughter the will to wake up, to survive. This book was written during the interminable hours the novelist Isabel Allende spent in the corridors of a Madrid hospital, in her hotel room and beside her daughter Paula's bed during the summer and autumn of 1992. This book started as a letter to Paula written during the hours spent at her bedside, and became a personal memoir and a testament to the ties that bind families – a brave, enlightening, inspiring true story. In December 1991, Allende’s daughter Paula, aged 26, fell gravely ill and sank into a coma.

Allende isabel paula