The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir -

Isabel Allende

Harper Perennial

2007

336 páginas

11h 12m

ISBN-13: 9780061551840

In this sequel to her memoir Paula (1995), about the year-long coma suffered by her daughter, Chilean novelist Allende tells of the difficult years following Paulas death. She makes a transformative journey in these pages, from the moving opening chapter, in which the grief-stricken author and her family scatter Paulas ashes in the forest, to the final rewarding coda, where she is able to once again experience contentment and gratitude for the abundance in her life. Framing her story around her family, and directly addressing her daughter throughout, Allende reveals herself in all her roles: feisty marital partner, intrusive mother, dedicated writer, and spiritual seeker. She takes great comfort from her wide circle of support, a loosely connected network she refers to as her tribe, which provides her with the three-ring circus material she needs for her writing. Among the many personal revelations she makes here are her daughter-in-laws discovery that she is gay, which broke up her marriage to Allendes son and launched the author into a laborious matchmaking process to help him remarry, and her own imbibing of a hallucinogenic tea, which subsequently helped awaken her imagination during the writing of her childrens books. Surprisingly candid, frequently funny, and highly aware of her own failings, Allende is a person fully engaged in life, and readers will find her eloquent memoir inspirational reading. --Joanne Wilkinson --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.