Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Popular Chilean author Isabel Allende is an admitted control freak, said Janet Hawley in the Melbourne Age. She begins writing each of her books on Jan. 8. She sends a letter to her mother daily from her San Francisco Bay area home. At 65, she gives no quarter to Father Time. “Of course I had cosmetic surgery,” she says. “Why would I want gray hair, sagging wrinkles, and warts with whiskers growing out of them?” The greatest part of her considerable energy, though, is devoted to her extended and complicated family—which includes grandchildren, stepchildren, and their assorted in-laws and exes. “What I would like is a big compound with a high fence and bodyguards, so I could lock them all in,”she says. “Then no one could escape my constant interfering.”

Allende’s spirited new memoir, The Sum of Our Days, proves that life always has other plans, said Michelle Locke in the Associated Press. The book opens in late 1992 as Allende is scattering the ashes of her daughter Paula, who died at 28 of a rare illness. Allende’s second husband, Willie, is wrestling with three drug-addicted grown children, one of whom will soon deliver a baby and disappear. That Thanksgiving, Allende’s son will learn that his wife and a woman engaged to one of Willie’s sons have fallen in love. “We look back and we say, ‘How did we survive as a family?’” says Allende. Of course, she has a ready answer. “Therapy,” she laughs. “A lot of therapy.”