Paula was published by Plaza & Janés in 1994 and is Allende’s most personal and most devastating book — a memoir written during the year her daughter Paula Frías lay in a coma (she suffered brain damage from porphyria in December 1991 and died in December 1992). Allende began writing at Paula’s hospital bedside in Madrid, initially as a letter to her unconscious daughter — telling her the family stories she might never hear again — and the book grew into a full memoir encompassing Allende’s entire life.
The book alternates between two narratives: the present (Paula’s illness, the hospital vigil, the gradual loss of hope) and the past (Allende’s childhood in Chile, her family’s history, the political upheaval of the coup, her years of exile, and her literary career). The effect is of a life reviewed in extremis — under the pressure of grief, every memory becomes urgent, every family story demands to be told before it is too late. Allende writes with absolute emotional honesty: her grief, her anger at God, her desperation, her moments of dark humor are all recorded without the protective distance of fiction.
The memoir is also a family chronicle — Allende’s stories of her mother, her stepfather (a diplomat), her uncle Salvador Allende, and her own turbulent life have the narrative energy of her novels. But the knowledge that Paula is dying gives every anecdote a weight that mere storytelling cannot achieve. The book’s final pages — describing Paula’s death and Allende’s grief — are among the most moving in modern literature.
Collecting Paula
First Spanish edition (Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1994): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Spanish edition: $20–$50
- First English edition (HarperCollins, 1995): $10–$25
- Signed copies: $40–$100