Isabel Allende: ‘It is all about love and loss’
- Independent Ink
- Oct 17
- 4 min read
‘Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.’
By Beena Vijayalakshmy in Toronto
There are writers who teach us how to think, and writers who remind us how to feel. Isabel Allende belongs to the second kind. She is a weaver of emotions, histories, and dreams, writing with a tenderness so open it feels like confession.
Born in Lima, Peru in 1942 and raised in Chile, Allende began her literary journey as a journalist. But after the violent death of her cousin, Salvador Allende in a coup, Chile’s deposed president, her words took on a deeper weight. Her writing became steeped in loss, exile, and longing.
She wrote The House of the Spirits from her home in Venezuela as an act of remembering. It began as a letter to her dying grandfather and grew into a multigenerational saga.
From that moment on, she never stopped writing about love. Not the fleeting kind, but the enduring kind that survives grief, politics, and time. “You are my story, my home,” she once wrote, “and the place I belong.”
Her characters often love in impossible circumstances, through dictatorship, war, migration, and magic, and yet their hearts never give up.
In one of her TED Talks, Allende smiles as she speaks about passion in old age. “I am eighty,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “I have lost the fear of being ridiculous.” She laughs and adds, “I think age should be celebrated because with it comes freedom and the ability to love without fear.”
That emotional boldness, the idea that love itself can be rebellious, runs through all her work. “We do not even know how strong we are,” she says, “until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for resilience is the most extraordinary thing.”
The belief that love is endurance, and tenderness is strength, defines Allende’s philosophy. She often says she writes about the heart’s geography; a landscape shaped as much by pain as by beauty.
“I can sum up my life in one sentence,” she told BBC HardTalk with quiet candour. “It is all about love and loss. Everything else is commentary.”
Not everyone has taken her seriously. Some literary critics dismiss her as too sentimental, too magical, too accessible. To them, she stands outside the austere canon of serious Latin American literature, too feminine, too emotional, too forgiving. But what they miss is exactly what makes her essential. In a world where irony is currency and vulnerability is seen as weakness, Allende insists that love is not only real but revolutionary.
Her so-called sentimentality is actually an act of defiance. She writes from a feminine consciousness that refuses to separate the personal from the political. Her heroines — Clara, Eva Luna, Inés Suárez — are women who create, nurture, fight, and love with equal intensity. They are grounded in realism but lit by imagination, bridging myth and memory in the same breath.
As Allende once told Oprah Winfrey, “Love is not a candle that flickers and dies. It is an eternal flame that burns brighter with compassion.”
That compassion for the living, for the dead, for the forgotten, is her genius. Her novels are not meant to be dissected, so much as felt. They are like stories told by your grandmother at dusk, when history and magic and truth blur together.
In the end, her legacy is not measured by literary fashion, but by the quiet transformations she inspires. Her books remind us, as she once wrote, that we only have what we give, and love is the only thing that multiplies when it is shared.
That is why, for millions around the world, Isabel Allende is more than a novelist. She is a companion in the ongoing act of being human. Her words, like her heart, remain endlessly and fiercely alive.
“Perhaps we are in this world to search for love, find it and lose it, again and again. With each love, we are born anew, and with each love that ends we collect a new wound. I am covered with proud scars.”
Beena Vijayalakshmy is a writer and translator with roots in Kerala, now based in Toronto. An avid reader and lover of literature, she has edited two poetry anthologies -- Bards of a Feather, Volumes 1 and 2, and curates a literary page on her social-media handle that showcases the work of poets, writers, and artists from around the world for a growing global audience. By profession a management consultant, she balances her corporate career with a lifelong commitment to literature and the arts. In keeping with her philosophy of lifelong learning, she is currently pursuing a degree in management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. By her own admission, she prefers to remain on the sidelines in the quiet spaces between prints.