SOURCE: An interview in Common Boundary, May/June, 1994, pp. 16-23.

In the following interview, Allende discusses her writing technique, how personal experience has affected her works, her literary influences, and her career as a journalist.

[Toms]: You began your writing career as a journalist. How did you become a fiction writer?

[Allende]: I didn't have a choice. I had been silent for a very long time, paralyzed by the experience of exile and the losses in my life. Then one day—it was January 8, 1981—I heard that my grandfather, who lived in Chile, was dying. When I was little, he was the most important male figure in my life. So I began a letter—it was a sort of spiritual letter—to say goodbye and to tell him that he could go in peace because I had all the anecdotes he had told me, all his memories, with...