The Sum of Our Days

A Sequel to her beloved bestselling book, PAULA, Isabel Allende s passionate new memoir is the inspirational story of a remarkable woman-mother, step-mother, grandmother, wife and lover, fiercely loyal friend, and dedicated writer-and of the unusual extended family Allende creates after the tragic loss of her daughter Paula. On a rainy December day in 1992, Isabel Allende and her family go to the forest near their home in northern California to scatter Isabel s daughter Paula s ashes to the wind. Beginning with that scene, Allende s new memoir unfolds--for Paula, whose spirit still inhabits her, and for the reader--the intimate and heartfelt story of what happens to her family in the years that follow Paula s death.
THE SUM OF OUR DAYS shows readers how one of the world s most imaginative writers reconstructs her own life in the wake of tragic loss. Recounting the days--kept fresh for Isabel through a daily correspondence with her mother in Chile--Allende weaves an episodic narrative from the lives of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her; a new idea of what constitutes a family emerges. She reveals the amazing stories behind her books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Most importantly, though, this book introduces us to the inner world of Isabel Allende: the importance of her marriage to Willie Gordon; the loves and infidelities, the dilemmas, disasters, and joys of her children and step-children, their various partners, and of the friends, gathered from afar, who have made themselves essential to her. All of these characters have one thing in common: they have touched Isabel s life, and so found their way into her heart, her tribe, and her writing.
Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor and wisdom, THE SUM OF OUR DAYS is a portrait of a contemporary family, tied together by the love, strong will, and stubborn determination of a beloved matriarch, the indomitable Isabel Allende.