Isabel was possessed by the myth of the Greek goddess Demeter, who searched for her daughter, Persephone, in Hades.Įven the exotic name of the illness that struck down her daughter-porphyria derives from the ancient Greek for "purple"-conspired with Isabel's resolve to live out Paula's story as classical myth. I met Isabel Allende during her first months of grieving for Paula, who died in Isabel's San Rafael home after she and her second husband, Willy (the protagonist of The Infinite Plan), brought Paula back from Spain.
Her husband, Ernesto, in return, truly adored Paula, as he was to demonstrate by his unswerving devotion throughout the nightmare year she lay unconscious, a heartbeat away from the untimely death she herself had anticipated in a letter she wrote her family on her honeymoon. As in Greek tragedy or a fairy tale, the mother was summoned to her daughter's side on the eve of calamity, and she was not to be spared a scintilla of the fate that befell her daughter.Īt the time the illness struck her down, in December 1991, Paula was 26 and in her first year of marriage to a man she loved deeply. The cause of Paula's illness was porphyria, an ancient and little-understood disease that Paula inherited from her father.Īllende's latest book, Paula, which began as a letter to her daughter while Isabel sat vigil at her bedside in a Madrid hospital, evolved into a search of Isabel's own-if not for God, then for a reason to go on living after all her maternal love and will power failed to bring her comatose daughter back to the world of the living.īy one of the coincidences that seem to shadow Isabel Allende in private life as well as in her writing, she was in Madrid to promote her novel The Infinite Plan the day Paula suffered violent seizures and sank into a coma.
"I am seeking God, but he seems to elude me," Isabel Allende's daughter Paula wrote her mother shortly before she suffered a seizure and fell into a coma from which she never recovered.
In her newest book, 'Paula,' novelist Isabel Allende searches for ancient meaning in the modern suffering of her daughter
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