You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm. I'm Michael Silverblatt. Today my guest is Isabella

Yende, the author most recently of Paola, published by Harper Collins. She's the author

as well of the House of the Spirits and the Infinite Plan and Eva Luna and stories of

Eva Luna and of Love and Shadows.

But today, what she and I are going to be doing is part of a series entitled Imaging the Us,

an exploration of autobiographical writings, which is a collaboration between Bookworm and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities.

This collaboration looks at the relationship between autobiographical writings,

memories, and the articulation of an us.

Now, it seems like you're the ideal writer for this subject, because so much family memory has gone into your work,

and once it has been put in your work,

it has become something like collective memory.

Do you think that the individual stories of the Allende's and your grandparents

are part of Chilean storytelling?

Oh, I wouldn't be so presumptuous, but I think that those stories are very similar to

the stories of other people in the same environment at the same time.

We all, as a collective group, we experience the same historical events, political events.

So in that way, maybe those stories are common to everybody.

You know, it's very strange.

...