Paula
As seen:
By Isabel Allende, and and, Margaret Sayers Peden
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1 review
In December 1991, Allende’s daughter Paula, aged 28 fell gravely ill and sank into a coma. 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.
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. 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. 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. TweetReviews
Whitley Bay Book Group discussed Paula in April 2025
Paula is part memoir, part history, part meditation as the author sits by the hospital bedside of her daughter who is in a coma. We all agreed that the writing was excellent (with one dissenter) and mainly because of the writing, our scores clustered around 3s and 4s (same dissenter). On the subject matter we enjoyed the stories, the descriptions of Allende’s eccentric and privileged family, the history of Chile and how it affected them, and her humour and honesty. Some of us are fans of her fiction, and magical realism in general, some of us less so. Some disliked the author, finding her actions at times illogical, self-indulgent, or just selfish although we agreed she presented them unsparingly.
We awarded the book between 1 and 4 stars, with an average of 3.5.
