Throughout our study on life narratives, one aspect that has really caught my attention is the use of life narratives as form of therapy or emotional release. We have certainly discussed the idea of life narrative as therapy in class, particularly following our presentation on the website PostSecret, as questions emerged about the likely possibility of users sending their confessional secrets in mail to the website as a way to free themselves from the weight of bearing private secrets. However, I feel that this is an area that requires further exploration: for this, I’d like to turn to the personal memoir Paula, written by the renowned Chilean novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende. For those of you unfamiliar with Allende and her work, basically, she is widely known in Latin America and abroad for her novel The House of Spirits (or “La Casa de los Espiritus”) certainly one of the most memorable books I have ever read. (There’s even a movie with Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons and Antonio Banderas). As far as her style, I think its significant to mention that Allende tends to continually blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, as she incorporates fragments of her own life into richly imaginative and meandering narratives.
As a memoir, Paula consists of a compilation of letters written by Allende as her daughter falls ill and succumbs to a “poryphia-induced coma”, as well as Allende’s own autobiographical account of her most obscure past experiences. In the article Mourning becomes Paula: The Writing Process as Therapy, writer Linda S. Maier argues that for Allende, the memoir Paula partially “serves as a creative, therapeutic release to help the author cope with personal tragedy” (Maier 237). This is certainly apparent in her interview with Marianne Schnall (7/11/08) for the article Isabel Allende, Loung Ung and the Power of Memoir, where Allende revealed that the main reason why she started the letters for Paula was that she recognized “the only way [for her] to deal with [her] grief was through writing”. Features of this “therapeutic release” are certainly evident in her inability to contain her focus as she reminisces her family life in the first chapter, fluctuating continually back and forth in time as she recounts her journey in a way that seems to exhibit characteristics of a person in the process of mourning. Following some research, I found out that the letters that eventually became part of the book were, in fact, written at the hospital as Allende witnessed her daughter’s progressive fall into her disease and subsequent comma.
To an extent, therefore, we could infer that Allende turned to storytelling as a way to heal and to come to terms with the overwhelming sense of loss and grief. Much like the protagonist of Dave Egger’s novel What is the What, Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, (who would tell his silent stories to anyone, willing to listen or not) Allende traces back her traumatic life story partially as a means to maintain her spirit, to find “strength” (Eggers 535) in her otherwise grueling and traumatic reality. Yet it is important to recognize that various motives could have played a role in her decision to produce her letters and to compile them into a memoir, and it would be an insult to the author to judge her only motive for writing the book as her need to cope with her debilitating sense of loss. Rather, one could also contend that Allende perhaps turned to storytelling to find the “sense of clarification” and “social control” (Miller and Shepherd 12) outlined by Miller and Shepherd; that is, to both find a viable way to reflect and understand her experiences in isolation and to transform her experiences into her own “prisoners”, or moments that she has control over; not vice-versa.
What do you think?
For further information about Allende, here’s a link to her TED talk “Tales of Passion“:
Works Cited
Eggers, Dave. What is the What. New York: Vintage Books, 200. Print.
Maier, L. A. “Mourning Becomes Paula: The Writing Process as Therapy for Isabel Allende” (2003). Hispania, 86(2), 237-243. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.
You did an incredible job relating what we have learned in class to a new research site! I love Isabelle Allende, and your post gave me an entirely new understanding and framework for reading her books. I found your gathering of different scholars really helpful to me in understanding your ideas, and I would be interested to see this kind of analysis done with other narratives I have read. Your discussion of writing as therapy also reminded me of the TRC exhibit at the Belkin Gallery, particularly the art therapy drawings that so many of us found moving.