Isabel Allende
An exerpt from Writers Dreaming by Naomi Epel.
I write in a very organic way. Books don't happen in my mind, they happen somewhere in my belly. It's like getting
pregnant. A long elephant pregnancy that can last two years. And then when I'm ready to give birth, then I sit
down. I wait for January 8th which is my special date and then, that day, I begin the book that has been growing
inside. Often when I sit that day and turn on my computer or my typewriter and write the first sentence, I don't
know what I'm going to write about because it has not made the trip from the belly to the mind yet. It is somewhere
hidden in a very sombre and secret place of the body or the mind where I don't have any access yet. It is something
that I've been feeling but has no shape, no name, no tone, no voice. So I write the first sentence which usually
is the first sentence of the book. That is the only thing that really stays. Then the story starts unfolding itself,
slowly, in a long process. By the time I have finished the first draft I know what the book is about but not before.
So, as I say, it's a very organic process.
Somehow inside me - I can say this after having written five books - I know that I know where I am going. I know
that I know the the end of the book although I don't know it. It's so difficult to explain. It is as if I have
this terrible confidence that something that is beyond myself knows why I'm writing this book. And what the end
of the book will be. And how the book will develop. But if you ask me what the book is about or where I am going
I can't tell you. I can't tell anybody. I can't even tell myself. But I have the certainty that I would not have
started the book without knowing why I'm writing it.
In a very superstitious way, it is as if I trust that there are voices that are outside myself, that talk through
me. So the voices know. And sooner or later I will listen to the whole message. For the time being, I only have
a particle of it.
With House of the Spirits , my first novel, I knew how the book would end, I knew what I wanted to say and I knew
why I had written it. Still, I had written the last fifteen pages more than ten times and I could never get it
right. It was solemn, preachy -- too political, melodramatic. I couldn't get the tone. I woke up at three o'clock
in the morning one night, with a dream. The dream was that my grandfather was lying on his bed.
My grandfather died very late in his life. He was nearly one hundred years old. And when my grandmother died, my
grand- father mourned her for a very long time. He dressed entirely in black. The tie, the suit, the shoes, everything.
He painted the furniture black. There were no flowers in the house and no radio and no parties and no dessert.
Nothing that would remind us of the happiness or the joy of life. It was a very long mourning.
In the dream I saw my grandfather dressed in black on his black bed. Everything was black in the room except the
white sheets. I was sitting on a black chair, dressed in black, and I was telling him that I had written this book
and what the book was about. So, when I woke up with the dream, I realized that I had been telling this story to
my grandfather all the time. The tone of the whole book was his voice and my voice talking. And I realized that
the end of the book, naturally, would be that the grandfather has died and the grandaughter is waiting for dawn
to bury him. So the epilogue has the tone of a person who is sitting beside her grandfather, who is dead, by his
bed, telling the story very simply. The dream gave me that.
When I begin a book, very rapidly I get into the story and it becomes the real world for me. That is, when I'm
driving the car, I'm not looking at this landscape, I'm in the landscape of the book. I try not to have any social
life, or very little. I try not to travel. Because everything that distracts me from the world of the book annoys
me, and bores me terribly. I'm a social person. But when I'm writing I'm not. So it's a very schizophrenic life.
I want to be with my husband. I'm very close with him. And when I'm writing I'm even closer because he's the only
person who shares this strange state of mind. So although I operate in a normal state and I can feed my grandson
and buy the groceries and all that, my mind is detached and it's very much into the story. Everything that happens
to me that I can use in the story becomes interesting. And everything that I cannot use in the story is eliminated
automatically. My mind becomes very selective. If we go to the movies and I see in a movie a sentence, an expression,
a color, a little incident that I can transform or somehow use, I want to see the movie again. If I realize that
I'm in Terminator Two and there's absolutely nothing I can use, I get bored and leave. I just can't stand it.
And with people it happens that way. People all of a sudden say something and that sentence opens a new dimension
of something I had never thought of before. This happened yesterday. I'm finishing another book and in this book
I have a person who has a dream. This person has been in the war and he has a nightmare that comes to him all the
time. In the nightmare the person is on the top of a mountain. It's misty or foggy. Everything happens in black
and white except sparkles of red, the blood. This person is on top of the mountain and the enemies come in black
pyjamas. He shoots but he doesn't hear any sound. And they still walk toward him. The bullets pass through them
as if they were made of shadows. That is the dream. He dreams this several times during the book.
So the dream is like a beating that is there all the time. I don't know why it is this dream and not another dream
but I asked my husband, do you have any explanation for the dream? Why would he dream this? And he said, well,
it's obvious. He feels that he's attacked and he can't defend himself. He's threatened and he's helpless and -
I said, yeah, but there is something else that I just can't explain. Why is it that he can't stop these guys? What
is this? Why is this so terribly threatening for a man who has seen so much, who has had such a hard time? So yesterday,
we were watching a movie and somebody was talking about faces - about what you see in other people's faces and
why you feel threatened by people of other races - and all of a sudden I had the explanation of the dream. The
guy never sees the face of the enemy and then, when he forces himself to look the enemy in the face, he realizes
that all those shadows have his own face. He's shooting at himself. So he's aware for the first time that the enemy
is within himself. I have been writing this book for two years and I still didn't have an explanation for the dream
until this person, yesterday, said this, and I could put both things together. The dream becomes perfectly logical
and it's the glue for the whole book.
If you can identify with the enemy's face, and you can see yourself in the enemy, there is no enemy. You realize
that war and everything is just so stupid because you are part of the same humanity. You are shooting this guy
because he looks different but it's you. It's always you.
My dreams are totally different. My nightmares are very precise. I have only two nightmares. They recur all the
time. I know what they mean and I know perfectly well why I have them.
In the longest nightmare, which has been with me all my life, I dream of a very disorganized and messy house. I
know that the house is me. This house has rooms, closed rooms, and I know that behind the door there is a mess.
It's not a threatening mess. It's not that something is growing inside the room like a beast or something menacing.
No. It's just furniture, old stuff, dust, darkness. Unexplored corners. Things that I have to clean up and organize.
Sometimes, in the dream, I open a door and clean up the room and then it's white, spic and span, perfect. But I
know that there's another door over there. I know that behind that door there will be another one and this is a
never ending, never ending dream. Because there is always another room. Sometimes the whole house is a mess and
sometimes I enter the house and it looks great and all of a sudden there's the door, the closed door. So, I know
that that's me and all the hidden parts that I have inside me that I have not been able to reach. And I will never
be able to reach. Maybe I'm a writer because I'm desperately trying to clean up my mess. Other people do other
things, going to therapy or becoming psychiatrists just to clean up the mess. Well, I couldn't afford therapy at
the time I needed it the most so I started writing. And now I know that the writing helps me a little because why
do I write about these things? Why do I choose those characters? Why am I so desperate to tell that story? Because
there's something inside of me that is bothering me, that gives me a lot of pain and that I need to solve. And
by exploring it through writing and other people's lives I might reach a particle of truth. Maybe. If I'm lucky.
That's the whole meaning of writing. So, the dream about the messy house, I know it's my dream. It's me.
Very often I wake up very anxious with a terrible headache. The headache lasts until I can identify what is bothering
me the most. Many things bother me in the messy house but often it's one thing that in my real life I've not been
able to solve and I'm postponing. I'm saying, it will be solved tomorrow or, it will be solved by itself or, somebody
else will interfere. Then I know that as long as it's there I will be having the dream every night and I will have
the headache. So finally I am forced, organically forced, to face it and talk about it and solve it.
My husband is wonderful at that because he was in therapy for five years. So, although he has not been in therapy
for many many years, he still has very clear concepts that help a person like myself. Everytime I have this dream
I tell him I've had it again, so we sit down and we talk. What is bothering me so much that I had the dream? And
if we can talk about it, usually it doesn't come back so often.
The other recurring dream I have is always very violent and always has to do with the military. These dreams began
after the military coup in Chile so I know that they are related to that period of my life. It's a wound that is
healed but it left a scar. I'm willing to live with that. It's the least that you could have after what happened
in Chile.
It comes back when I see a violent movie in the afternoon, especially violence in any form related to abuse of
a weak person - say that it's a child who is abused or it's about Nazis or people marching in uniform. The dream
isn't, as the house dream, always exactly the same, but it always has to do with the military, with people marching
or shooting. It's a bloody dream. I'm always without any escape. It's a dream about being trapped.
The night I met my husband I had a dream that I still remember. It was a very strange dream because I was on a
lecture tour. I had divorced my ex-husband after 29 years. We divorced on very friendly terms but I had to get
out of Venezuela for a while because I wanted to get away from the pain and the children. So I went on a lecture
tour all over and ended up in the United States. We met in San Jose. He went there because he knew that I was lecturing
there. And after the lecture there was a dinner party in an Italian restaurant with a group of people. He was part
of the group. I was tired. Two months traveling! And he was just another person at the table. There was nothing
peculiar or glamorous about him. Nothing whatsoever. The only thing that made him different was that he spoke Spanish.
He didn't even say that he had read my book. And so we talked for awhile, not much, and then he said, if you come
to San Francisco I would like to show you the Bay Area. And I said, yeah, I'm coming to San Francisco tomorrow.
He said, well, if you have time give me a call.
That night I had the dream of the military again. This time it was in a kind of golf course with bushes at the
sides and I was hiding in the bushes. And the military, this long column of soldiers, was marching in the middle
of the golf course. I knew that when they reached a hole that was there, a golf hole, it was time for me to die.
I was trying desperately to prevent them from reaching that point. So when I realized that it was impossible, that
I couldn't move the hole or move the column, I tried to hide in the bushes. But it was no real protection. Then
I saw a man dressed like an Arab with a white tunic, coming to me. Somehow he knew that I was in the bushes there.
He came and he covered me with this white tunic and he walked in front of the military with me hidden in his clothes.
And when I looked at him he had Willi's face.
So I had the dream and I told it to a very nice gentleman who had gone to hear me talk. We met for breakfast in
the dining room and I told him this strange dream because I was upset, very upset, as I always am when I dream
of the military. And the man said, well, maybe this dream means that you want to be protected by this man. So the
next day when I came to San Francisco, I called Willi and he invited me to Mount Tam to see the bay. It was a beautiful
autumn day, very clear, so it was a lovely sight. Then he invited me to his house for dinner. When I reached his
house I realized that his house was the nightmare that I had always had. The messy house. You can't imagine the
mess! It was just awful. I couldn't get out of the car because there was so much dog shit in the garage. You couldn't
open the door. He had to pull back so that I could get out of the car. There were clothes and toys. There had been
a fire on Christmas and the furniture was burnt. There wasn't much furniture. A broken window. It was awful. And
so when finally he took me back to the hotel that night I thought, Oh my God, I wish I will never ever in my life
find myself again in a place like that. You see how life is? A week later I was living with him in that mess! You
know that it was so messy that we just couldn't clean up. We had to move. So now we are living here. It was a strange
dream. Maybe it was a sort of premonition because, in many ways, Willi saved me from the past and from myself and
from all the threats of the past. He gave me a country, roots, a home. Many things that I didn't have. I had been
drifting for a long time. So that was good.
At times I get mis-led because I believe that dreams can predict the future. Sometimes I have a terrible dream
and I think it will happen so I get very upset and then it doesn't happen. Let me give you one example. Three and
a half years ago I had just married my husband and we went for our honeymoon to Lake Cuomo in Italy. It was a beautiful
place. A fantastic hotel, a beautiful full moon, but instead of making love I had this awful dream that my son,
who was visiting Chile, had been taken by the police and was going to be tortured. I woke up with the feeling that
it was a premonition and that I had to get my son out of the country no matter what. So I tried desperately to
get in touch with my son and tell him to leave the country immediately. And I just couldn't get in touch with him.
The telephone would ring and ring and nobody would pick it up. I was so, so distressed I couldn't go back to sleep.
My husband tried to reason with me. Tried to tell me that these were all ghosts from the past and that I had to
think clearly and wait for the morning. With the light and the sun and the beautiful landscape of the lake I would
realize that it was just a dream. I couldn't get out of the dream. I was so upset that finally at dawn we called
my parents house and I learned that my son was up in the mountains skiing. So it wasn't at all a premonition and
when I told him that he had to get out of the country he wouldn't listen. He stayed and had a wonderful vacation.
If he had left we would have never known if the dream was true or not. So now I'm more cautious about really making
a decision because of a dream.
My grandmother is the model for Clara in The House of the Spirits . My grandmother was just like her. Or
maybe she wasn't and I have made up everything. But I based the character on the stories I heard about my grandmother,
who was a funny, wonderful, clairvoiant character. She died when I was very little but I remember her very well.
Sometimes in my dreams she is doing things. Sometimes she is writing and I read what she's writing over her shoulder.
She's always young in the dream although I never met her when she was young. She was in her late forties when she
died. But when I see her I see her like a picture that I always have with me. She was nineteen years old in the
picture. I always see her very young and always dressed in old fashioned clothes. So I know it's her.
I don't remember the words she is writing in these dreams. Sometimes I remember that she's writing with colored
ink or I remember that she's writing in a notebook or at the bottom of a photograph. That kind of thing. But I
don't remember what she's writing. It's a very soothing dream. When she comes in the dreams it's because I'm really
doing well. I'm writing, I'm happy. She always represents, for me, protection.
Her powers are exagerated in the book. She couldn't move the piano with her mind or play Chopin with the lid on
but they say she could move the salt. I remember when I was little they had these seances on Thursdays at home.
I didn't participate but I watched. There was nothing spooky about it. It was just part of life. It was taken in
a very natural way. My grandmother had three very good friends, sisters. In real life they were called the Morla
sisters. They were very well known in Chile. This sisterhood was experimenting, for the first time in Chile, openly,
with telepathy, with spiritism and all of these things that now they study in universities here. But at that time
it was forbidden by the Catholic Church. So my grandmother was very rebellious in that sense. She was defying everything,
the patriarchal authority, the Church.
My grandfather, who was a pragmatic Basque, never paid any attention to any of these things. He thought it was
just bullshit, and he never believed in any of it, because she couldn't prove it. It was not scientific. But then,
late in her life, my grandmother started saying maybe it was not the souls of the dead that moved the three legged
table but extraterrestrials. And then my grandfather got interested because he thought that was scientific.
I come from a very strange family. With that family you don't need to invent anything. It's given to you.
I don't know where to trace the line between reality and fantasy. Once I said this in a lecture and a person in
the audience said I needed therapy. I said, if I go into therapy what will I write about? Without my demons what
will I write about? It's true. Sometimes I don't know what has really happened in my life and what I wrote that
I thought happened and maybe it never did.
Who cares! You make up everything anyhow. Memory is so selective. If you tell the same story three times there
are different angles. For example, my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth.
He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd.
So if we tell the same event, say the way we met, I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was
and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are true. He has one. And I'm positive that that's not true.
It didn't happen that way in my mind. Maybe that is his angle. He says that he read my second novel and fell in
love with the book. He felt that the book was telling him something. There was something in the book - he couldn't
identify what it was - but he wrote a note to the person who had given him the book, a professor of Latin American
literature in the University in San Jose. He wrote her a note saying this woman understands love the way I do.
And he said that he was interested in that aspect of it. He was not at all impressed by me. People usually expect
someone taller with bigger breasts and some clear ideas, I suppose, so he was really disappointed.
My mother used to have a very terrible dream. She separated from my father - there is no divorce in Chile - when
I was very little. She was left alone with three kids. She was not prepared to work. She was very young, in a very
conservative society where women were not supposed to be in that situation, so she went back to live in her parents
house and she started working, trying to make a living.
She would dream that she was in a boat in the middle of the ocean and there was a tempest. The boat sank and she
had to save the kids. She could only save one. And she had three. She would be swimming from one kid to the other
trying to keep them above the water. But she knew that she would have to make up her mind and save only one. That
was her recurrent dream.
I had a similar dream for awhile that I had to save one of my two kids. Fortunately the dream is gone. The worst
year in my life was probably 1978. I usually say that it was 1973 because that was the year of the military coup
but the consequences of that event were apparent to me to me only in 1978. In 1978 I realized that all my life
had been destroyed. I thought at that time that I wouldn't have another opportunity. I'd been struggling all those
years to survive and then, in 1978, I gave up.
I wanted to die. And so I started having that dream. My mother's dream. The dream that I had to save one of my
kids. I had to make a choice. And in the dream I was tempted to die in order not to make that choice. I would rather
drown myself and let everybody drown so that I wouldn't be forced to make the choice of saving one of them. I would
wake up with this terrible feeling of oppression and death, of terrible, indescribible anxiety. Sweating and crying
and sometimes nauseated. Then I tried to analyze the dream. Each time I had it, I wrote it down. Sometimes the
children were drowning, sometimes they were in a plane, sometimes we were in different situations but it was always
the choice. And in my thinking of the dream and and writing the dream over and over again I realized that I was
trying to escape from the responsibility of bringing up my kids. I was so distressed because I didn't have anything.
I had lost my job, my country. My family was living in exile. I had lost my love too because I didn't love my husband
any more. I felt terribly lonely. I felt that the only thing that really tied me to this world were the kids. And
I didn't have the strength to fight for both of them. Or for either of them, really. So my temptation was to die.
To kill myself so that I wouldn't have to face it. And by thinking about the dream and writing about the dream
I realized that I was escaping from them and from everything. It helped me. It helped me a lot. I could start again.
I got a job and I started working because I'd decided that my only goal was to educate my children. By the time
they would be out of the University I would be free to do what ever I wanted. So I postponed any suicidal ideas
or anything about my own life - happiness, love, marriage, everything - until I finished with both my kids. That
was wonderful because it saved me from myself, from despair.
They say that if you don't dream you go mad. That even dogs, animals dream. I don't know. I think that it's wonderful
that one can dream. The first thing my husband and I do in the morning when we wake up is we tell each other what
we dreamt. Very briefly. It's not that we sit there and analyze our dreams at all. We don't have time for that.
But we learn a lot about each other.
In Chile dreaming of losing teeth means that you or somebody else are going to die. If it's painful, somebody very
close will die and if it's without pain, then you will hear of somebody's death. And if you lose all your teeth,
you will die.
Dreaming of snakes in Chile means money. I have had that dream twice and I'm not a gambler. I hate gambling. The
first time, all the family, all the tribe, was spending some vacation time on the beach in Chile before the military
coup. And I had this dream that my brother-in-law was standing and nineteen snakes were crawling up his legs. So
the next day I said, "you should go to the casino and gamble because you will get a lot of money playing nineteen."
And he said,"No, I'm terrible at that." I said, "Well let's split whatever it is, whatever you lose
or gain." So we went to the casino and I bought a comic book and I sat outside to read and he went in. After
a while he came out and he said, "I lost everything. Your dream was the shits." And I said, "but
did you play nineteen?" And he said, "No. You didn't say that." I said, "I did say that. There
were nineteen snakes!" And so we went back together and he played nineteen and he won! We were so suprised
and so appalled at the same time that we started yelling and screaming and we left all the money there and it came
up a nineteen again. So we had a basket full of bills, which of course with the inflation is nothing, but at that
time we could invite the whole tribe, thirteen people, for dinner in the best restaurant in town. I remember that
we spent the money on that. And then I won three hundred bucks in a casino in Aruba with my stepfather after I
dreamt that snakes were crawling up his body also.
One dream that is always prophetic for me is pregnancy. I always knew with my two children before there was any
symptom when I was pregnant. And what the child would be, a boy or a girl. I always see the boy or the girl in
the dream. It's the same with my grandchildren. So when my son came to visit with his recent wife, I said you will
have a boy. I saw the boy and I saw exactly the boy that they have now. I saw both my kids as well. I never had
to think of a name because they already had a name in the dream. Names that I would've never chosen because nobody
in my family has those names. So now I know that my daughter-in-law very soon will be pregnant and she will have
a girl. I know.
I have a space in my computer where I write my dreams. I keep a little note-pad near my bed and if I wake up with
a dream in the middle of the night I go silently to the bathroom - because I don't want to wake up my husband -
and I write it down because I will forget afterwards. And later I write it in the computer. I know that many of
them don't have any meaning. Sometimes I think they're wonderful and that I can use them in the writing and the
next day I read them and they are terrible. I can't use a word of them. But that state of semi-consciousness that
you have when you just wake up from a dream - it's dawn and everything is silent and you are still half asleep
and half awake - in that moment I think that one can listen.
It is as if one had a storage room where you have information that you can't reach when you're awake. Information
that you get through different channels that you're not aware of during the day. Something you heard, something
you saw, something that happened to somebody. A smell. A color. A texture. And you grab it. And you store it. And
you're not aware of it at all. Then, in that dreamy state, somehow you can reach in the darkness and find something
like a treasure that is hidden in this storage room. And that is what your dream is about. It's bringing back information
to your conscious mind that has always been there because you wouldn't dream about it if you didn't have it already
within you. So it's yours. You're not dreaming anybody else's dream. You just have to get there.
Sometimes I reach back into that storage room and bring out some information, write about it and then it becomes
true. And I think that it's like a premonition. But if I try to explain it I would say that the information was
in the air. It was always there, somehow, in the collective memory in some sort of radio emission or something
and I tune into it.
For example I have another story with Love and Shadows . I wanted to symbolize somehow, in a very strong way, the
feeling of the people for the military. So I wrote that when the protests began in this country, whose name is
never mentioned in the book, the people went out into the streets dragging a pig dressed up as a general. They
humiliated the pig in the middle of the street until the soldiers came. They shot him. They had to the kill the
pig in order to rescue the emblems of the military. I think that I had a dream about it and then I wrote about
it. I went to Spain for the publication of the book. I think it was October. Nobody had read the book except my
mother and my agent and I hadn't seen yet a copy of the book. I was in the hotel the first day I got there and
I saw in a Spanish newspaper that, in Chile the people had dragged a pig into the middle of the street with the
emblems of the military. And the soldiers had to kill him in order to rescue the cap and the cape. I was so shocked
because my book had not been published yet. How did I get the idea? Maybe so many people were thinking about it
that I could just listen, hear. That could be also. I'm sure this is not the only case, many many people do that.
I don't believe that there are independent spirits of the dead that come to you to pull your legs when you're asleep.
No. I think that we are all particles of some sort of universal spirit. If we can get over this idea of our little
bodies, our little selfishness and greed, this idea that we are something individual, just forget about it and
tune into the wonderful peaceful idea that you are just part of something that is there and is whole and that when
you die you will go back to that thing that is whole and is part of your grandson and part of the flowers and part
of everything that surrounds you and will prevail, then the spirit has a sense. Because it's not you. It's everywhere.
You're just a particle of something that's beyond you. Then you understand the legends, the myths. You understand
why so many people at a certain point do the same thing or dream the same thing or hope for the same thing or fear
the same thing. Because you're just part of that wholeness. When you reach that point, then you believe, as I do,
that my grandmother lives in me and in my grandson and in my future great grandchildren. And that when I need her
I don't have to sit at a three legged table with a candle and use tarot cards to bring her to me. I just have to
listen. I have to ask.
If I am in a very confused situation in which I really need to make a decision, I always ask myself what would
my grandmother do. My grandmother was a wonderful human being and she always has an answer. The answer usually
has absolutely no common sense. It's always a very generous answer and there is some sort of hidden wisdom in it.
But no common sense. I know that it's what nobody else would do. But somehow it works.
Like for example asking myself when I met Willi: This man's life is a mess. He has children addicted to drugs.
A hyperactive child that is also a mess. He's full of debts. I don't like the United States. I don't want to live
speaking in English. I have to forget about him. And then I thought, what would my grandmother do? She would pack
a few things in a very small handbag, leave and run after him. That's what I did. And it worked fine. When I told
my mother what I was going to do she thought I was totally out of my mind. And the only person who really supported
me, because he thought that I would get out of it, was my son who said, yeah, go and spend a week with him and
get him out of your system. So I came. And I never left.
When I'm scared - and I'm always scared when I have to face an audience, when I have to read a review, when I publish
a book, every time I have a mammogram I'm scared because I already had surgery once - then I think of my grandfather.
My grandfather was this strong, tough Basque who would never bend. So, when I think of him, his spirit lifts in
me and I say, well, what would he do? Well, he would go ahead, close his eyes and drive forward. And it works.
You do it and the spirit that is within you, that part that you have received and that is still living in me and
in my children and in my mother and in everybody else, is there.
Sometimes I think, what would I do if my mother dies? She is the longest and most important relationship in my
life. More than any man that I've ever had. More than my own children and my grandchildren. Because she was with
me before I was born and she has been with me always with unconditional love. All the other loves that I have had
are conditional. I want to love my children if they love me. I want to love my husband if he gives me all that
I demand.
With my mother it doesn't work that way. Even if I killed the Pope she will love me. So what will I do when she's
not here? She also corrects my books so this is the end of my literary career if she dies or turns senile. The
other day I told this, joking, to my publisher. I said, well, this is probably my last book because my mother is
seventy, you know. And he laughed. And I said, yah, because if something happens to her mind or she dies I won't
be able to write. And he said, you're kidding! Your mother is inside you already. So even if she dies she's always
with you. I realized that he's right. Absolutely right. I will always be able to say, OK, here I have a terrible
sentence, how does this thing work? And my mother will come back to me. So that's what it is about. And I hope
that when I die I will have been able to, during my life, plant little seeds in the soul of my children and my
grandchildren so that when they need something from me I will always be available. That's the way I believe the
spirit works.
I believe that I have a spiritual connection with my husband that is beyond any explanation. We are two absolutely
totally different people that come from different backgrounds, different cultures, races, language, everything.
And yet I feel him inside me. We won't part, I know. I know positively that nothing will separate us. Ever. Because
we've found something that is very spiritual and has nothing to do with being sick or in good health, young or
not. Poor or rich. No. It works on another level. I've never had this before with another man. He has never had
this with another woman before. So, I've relaxed for the first time in my life and I don't care about the tall
blondes any more. The world is full of tall blondes.
It's strange the miracles that books will work! If Willi hadn't read my book he would have never gone to that lecture.
He would have never met me. You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the
ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the
right person.
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