SOURCE: "Farewell My Daughter," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 30, 1995, pp. 3, 8.

Grumbach is an American educator, biographer, memoirist, and critic who has written such works as Coming into the Endzone: A Memoir (1991). In the following review of Paula, she praises Allende's storytelling abilities.

Many people believe that fiction arises out of somewhat well-disguised autobiography. Such readers search authors' life stories for clues to their seemingly imaginative fiction, certain that, if only they knew enough of the authors' real lives they could account for every detail that appears on the pages of novels. Isabel Allende's beautiful and heart-rending memoir [Paula] supplies ample evidence for those of that conviction. Admirers of her fiction, and scholars-to-come of her oeuvre, may use this new book to explain the origin of the characters in her work: The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna and The Infinite Plan. It...