Allende explores her relationship with her own mother, documented in the hundreds of letters they exchanged since she left home.
She writes of her own Chilean childhood, the violent death of her uncle, Salvador Allende, and the family's flight to Venezuela from the oppressive Pinochet regime. Her mother, as she watched by Paula's bedside, began to write this book, driven by a desperation to communicate with her unconscious daughter. In 1991, while living in Madrid with her husband, Paula was felled by porphyria, a rare blood disease, and, despite endless care by her mother and husband, lapsed into an irreversible coma. A magician with words, Allende makes this grim scenario into a wondrous encounter with the innermost sorrows and joys of another human being. Writing nonfiction for the first time, she interweaves the story of her own life with the slow dying of her 28-year-old daughter, Paula. Allende is a mesmerizing novelist (The House of the Spirits The Stories of Eva Luna) who here takes on a double challenge.
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