Isabel Allende has long been my favorite author since I read her House of the Spirits for the first time nearly twenty years ago. Since then, I have reread her opus three times, as well as a number of her novels and memoir The Sum of Our Days. Until now, however, I had been avoiding her first memoir Paula, which details the year and a half of her life where she dealt with her daughter's long illness that eventually lead to her death. Needing a book from the 1990s for my women's 20th century chal...

Paula, Isabel AllendePaula is a 1992 memoir by Isabel Allende. Paula is completely naked memories, which nail the reader in place like horror stories. She intended to write a straightforward narrative about the darkest experience of her own life. But the book is a tribute to her deceased daughter Paula Frías Allende, who fell into a induced Porphyry coma, in 1991 and never recovered.تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه ژانویه سال1999میلادیعنوان: پائولا؛ نویسنده: ایزابل آلنده؛ مترجم: مریم بیات؛ تهران، علم، چا...

Isabel Allende wrote that her memoir was published despite reservations from her agents and some editors who felt that the topic, plus the fact that she had exposed herself to the "public gaze without holding anything back," could harm her. Thank goodness she went ahead with it.Part of what makes this book so beautiful is the tone: she wrote it as a letter to her daughter who was lying in a coma in Madrid, Spain. Letter writing had been going on for years in this family. Isabel usually wrote a l...

Paula by Isabel Allende is an autobiographical account of her family's experiences in Chile, writing feverishly at the bedside of her daughter, Paula, as she lay in a coma from a genetic neurological disease in Barcelona, Spain. At first it was written for Paula so that she will not be lost or afraid when she awoke; then as it became clearer that this wouldn't happen, Allende continued to write as a cathartic of the time her family was driven from their home in Chile following the military coup

When Isabel Allende’s daughter became gravely ill and fell into a coma, the author spent days at Paula’s bedside. At her own mother’s urging, Allende began to write the story of her family for Paula in an attempt to connect her child with her ancestors, “…so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.” Evocative, heart-rending, luminous, suspenseful, triumphant – I cannot think of enough adjectives to describe this beautifully written memoir. Allende lays her soul bare on the page. She brin...

This book has got to be one of the most heartfelt and soulful books I have ever read. Although the book is entitled Paula, it is very much about Isabel, her life and her relationship with her daughter. Paula. Paula has become very sick, went into a coma and that's where the book starts. The writing and the feelings of Isabelle are real, raw and relatable. I never realized the history of her home country, Chile and the devastating time of the dictatorship. I found her life's story to be on an ext...

very touching...make you cry with isable allende

Isabel Allende starts this book as a collection of letters to her daughter who fell into a coma. She wrote this while caring for her in a Madrid hospital so that when Paula, the daughter who might be suffering from brain damage, woke up, she could read everything about her ancestry.Isabel Allende is known for her story-telling but I've actually never read her fiction. Sorry, I lied. I read Daughter of Fortune a long time ago but I've forgotten everything about it. But I like her biography, My In...

What a wonderful epic story! An ode to life, to love, to the unique bond between mother and child. I am so so sorry for the lost! It is hard even to imagine the hurt of a mother who accompanies his child to death. I want to write about its beauty - but I am afraid I won't pay respect to a devastating hurt. I've just "met" Allende in December, 2019 when I was reading "The House of Spirits". It just captivated me with her easy heart-breaking style, in parts filled with sorrows, in parts, with joy

Maybe a 3.5 stars rating? Not sure.The idea behind this book is dramatic and beautiful: Isabel Allende's daughter Paula is sick, gets admitted to the hospital, slips into a coma and eventually dies. What would the storyteller and writer Isabel Allende do at her daughter's bedside for over a year? She would talk to her unconscious daughter, and would write her all the memories she has about her own life and family history to pass the cold waiting hours until Paula wakes up. That manuscript would

Discussion Guide:(Questions compiled by Rihab Sebaaly)1- Paula is the first nonfiction book written by Allende. Did you notice this? Did you feel that Paula was written by someone with no experience in nonfiction books?2- Where Do you love Allende more: in nonfiction or in fiction books? And why?3- Allende rewrote Chile’s history and her own history in this book. Do you think she was objective especially when she narrated the events surrounding Salvador Allende's life and politics?4- Did you enj...

Isabel Allende’s novel Paula recounts the death of her daughter in 1992. Her daughter Paula had encountered the disorder Porphyria that affects the nervous system. In her case, through a variety of factors, she ended up in a coma, and after much intervention, she passed away at age 29. In short, this was not a pleasant read on the surface.Twisting the tale, Allende retells her own life story to her coma-induced daughter Paula while intermingling updates along the way. The book acts on many level...

What could be more complicated than watching our daughter die? The insane hope of recovery than the long accompaniment until the end?"Paula" therefore begins with a letter from Isabel Allende to her sick daughter. She tells him her family's story, a saga full of legends and imagination. Still, this narrative of the past is interrupted by the events of the present, the deterioration of Paula's health, the distress, the treatments and the superstitions that try to overcome the evil and even the in...

Why I chose to listen to this audiobook:1. I'm a fan of Isabel Allende's writing; and,2. March is my self-proclaimed "Memoirs & Biographies Month".Positives:1. Allende writes a captivating memoir of her life, alternating the past with the present, as a tribute to her dying daughter, Paula. As I listened to this story, I was reunited with Allende's book The House of the Spirits because its various characters were based on several of her real-life family members;2. once again, Allende's writing st...

well written, but so tedious! i just can't get into this book. by no means am i belittling the very sad situation with her daughter, paula. since the author wants to express her spiritual gifts and insights, here's mine: spirits know everything once they have passed over. all the secrets of family, of you, of history are revealed to them. they don't read novels.yeah, her childhood, etc, isn't the greatest and some crap things happen, but the family is part of the top-crust upper class. it couldn...

Full review at TheBibliophage.comIn her wide-ranging memoir, Isabel Allende tells the story of a conversation she had with famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. As they talked, he said to her, “My dear child, you must be the worst journalist in the country. You are incapable of being objective, you place yourself at the center of everything you do, I suspect you’re not beyond fibbing, and when you don’t have news, you invent it. Why don’t you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are vi...