Bookworm has an interview with Isabel Allende about her new memoir The Sum of Our Days here. I transcribed my favorite parts for you:

On starting out as a writer:

As a writer, I wrote The House of the Spirits at night. I had two jobs, two shifts, I worked 12 hours a day. And at night, after dinner, I would sit in the kitchen with a portable typewriter, and I would type away like crazy until I was dead with fatigue, and I would have to go to bed. And in a year, I wrote The House of the Spirits.

Of Love and Shadows, I wrote inside of a closet. I’m not exaggerating. I took everything out of the closet and put a board and a light bulb, and there I put my typewriter and my papers. And I would close the closet, my office would be closed. And when I opened the closet, I could write–until I had a room of my own, many years and many books past.

So my life has been very unstable. It’s only now, for the first time in my life that I feel that I have a safe place and a quiet place to write. But if I didn’t have it, I would still write.

On the blurring of imagination and reality:

There’s a point when I start writing where I can’t trace a line between what I have imagined, what I have dreamed, what is real, what maybe I have read. Sometimes I have to check myself to see if I’m not plagiarizing … because everything is confused in my mind. And the real lives of the real people around me become stories, and they come into the books and they come out of the books, and I don’t even know who is a character and who is a person.

Can’t say I have experienced that last bit; sounds a little frightening. But maybe that’s part of her being obsessive and single-minded enough to write a book in a year after working two jobs and 12-hour days. Wowza.