I'm not interested in people who have easy lives, because they
don't make good characters for books.
My stepfather, whom I adored, he was my real father,
used to say, why am I not in any of your books?
And I would say, because you have common sense.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
My grandmother had seances.
That was a real scandal.
Even the Catholic church got involved.
That kind of hero is what I want in my books.
[TYPING]
My grandfather was dying in Chile,
and I was living in exile in Venezuela.
And I started a letter to say goodbye to him.
In a way, I wanted to tell him that I could remember
everything he had ever told me, all the anecdotes
of the family, all his fabulous stories.
He was a great storyteller.
So I started with the first anecdote
that I remembered that he told me about.
His first fiancee, who died in mysterious way.
She was called Rose, Rosa.
And then many years later, he married Rosa's youngest
sister, who was my grandmother.
So that's how The House of the Spirits, my novel,
began, as a letter, reminding my grandfather about Rosa.
NARRATOR: "Barrabas came to us by sea,
the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.
She was already in the habit of writing down important matters,
and afterward, when she was mute,
she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that 50 years
later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past
and overcome terrors of my own."
My grandmother had seances to call the spirits.
She spent her life studying paranormal phenomena
that at the time, was even forbidden
by the Catholic church.
She worked with telepathy, trying to move objects
without touching them.
And when I was a little girl, I would sit at the table
when they were doing the seances.
So I grew up with the idea that the world is a very
mysterious place and that there are many dimensions of reality.
And if you open your heart and your mind,
your life is enriched by everything that we cannot
explain and we cannot control, but we see the evidence.
There is a difference between fantasy and magic realism.
Fantasy, you never see a manifestation
of fantasy in real life.
For example, the invisibility cloak of Harry Potter.
Magic realism would be the invisible Indians in the Amazon
who really exist.
And they paint their bodies in the colors of nature
and work so swiftly and silently in nature,
that they can be three yards away and you don't see them.
So that's magic realism.
There is some manifestation in reality of something that you
cannot explain or that it has an explanation that you
don't know.
[TYPING]
When I was very young and pregnant,
there was a young woman who wanted to start
a new magazine in Chile.
Chile was a very conservative patriarchal country.
And she wanted a magazine that would sort of challenge
the culture and the society, and especially the patriarchy.
I mean, it was going to be a feminist feminine magazine.
In journalism, I learned all the skills
that now I can use in fiction.
How to research, how to conduct an interview,
how to use language efficiently, how to
really get to the emotion of the reader.
Feminism was very new.
I mean, no one was talking about it yet.
And a way I thought of challenging
men and all the prejudices and the stereotypes
was to make fun of it.
I would write a lot about husbands and a lot
about, well, male chauvinists in general,
all the ridiculous forms of male chauvinism.
And sometimes I would write something serious.
For example, I wrote an interview
to a woman that was unfaithful.
In Chile, it is sort of, it was, and I
think it still is sort of assumed
that men could be unfaithful.
It was part of being masculine, but not women.
That was a real scandal.
Even the Catholic church got involved.
And I had so much fun writing it.
[TYPING]
When I was living in Venezuela, it was a cultural shock.
I came from Chile, which is a totally different country.
But it also, Chile at the time was a somber country
that was living in fear.
I arrived in Venezuela, this exuberant tropical country
of abundance.
It was the time of the oil boom for Venezuela.
Any excuse was good for dancing and drinking.
And I met there a young woman called Elsa Morales, who
was a primitive artist.
She would do these paintings that had no perspective
and in bright colors, and she never
wanted to learn anything about painting,
because it was her primitive art that was so striking and so
beautiful.
And talking with her, she told me her life.
And many of the anecdotes in Eva Luna
are from Elsa Morales's life.
But what I wanted, was to describe this exuberant country
that I was falling in love with.
NARRATOR: "My name is Eva, which means life, according to a book
of names my mother consulted.
I was born in the back of a shadowy house
and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin,
and human mummies.
But none of those things made me melancholy,
because I came into the world with a breath
of the jungle in my memory."
[TYPING]
My most recent published book, A Long Petal of the Sea,
it's a story of people who are displaced, of refugees.
And it starts in January of 1939 when
it's the end of the Civil War in Spain, that was devastating
and lasted three horrible years.
The fascists with Franco win the war.
And the Republicanos, who were the other side, many of them
left Barcelona and walked toward the border with France.
In 24 hours, there was half a million people at the border.
They were not prepared for that.
And it was a terrible winter week.
People were dying.
So eventually they had to open the border and let them in.
But they didn't know what to do with them,
so they put them in concentration camps,
which were improvised with barbed wire
closing the beaches.
Many, many died in these camps.
NARRATOR: "Hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees
were escaping to France, where a campaign of fear and hatred
awaited them.
Nobody wanted these foreigners.
Reds, filthy fugitives, deserters, delinquents,
as the French press labeled them.
Repugnant beings who were going to spread epidemics,
commit the robberies and rape, and stir up
a communist revolution.
For three years, there had been a trickle
of Spaniards escaping the war.
There was little sympathy for them,
but they were dispersed throughout France
and were almost invisible."
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who
loved Spain and had many friends in Spain,
convinced the government of Chile
to receive 2,000 refugees.
And they said, OK, bring them, but they
didn't give him any money.
So he went to France and he managed to gather some money,
got a ship called the Winnipeg, a cargo ship, and sort
of conditioned it to transport 2,000 people to Chile.
They changed the culture.
They brought Europe to Chile, which
was a very provincial faraway country.
They were printers, publishers, philosophers, historians,
artists, musicians.
And these people contributed so much
that them and their descendants are
the best known artists and scientists and astronomers
in Chile.
They descend from the Winnipeg.
So that's a happy story of refugees that are incorporated,
welcomed into a society and they enrich the society.
If they are marginalized in ghettos, they become a problem.
But if they are part of the society, then everybody gains.
NARRATOR: "That summer day, August 4, 1939,
remained forever engraved on the minds of Victor Dalmau, Roser
Bruguera, and the other 2,000 or more Spaniards
sailing toward that long narrow South American country.
But clung to the mountains, so as not to topple into the sea.
None of them knew anything about Chile.
Years later, Neruda was to define it
as a long petal of sea and wine and snow,
with a belt of black and white foam.
But that would not have left the migrants any the wiser.
On the map, it looked slender and remote."
Now what happened, was that 30 years later, we
had a leftist government in Chile
like they had had in Spain in 1936.
And there was a military uprising
controlled by the right wing and the Catholic church,
and in our case, the CIA, that toppled the government
and installed a dictatorship that lasted 17 years in Chile.
So the same people who had been refugees the first time,
became refugees the second time.
And that's how I met one of them in Venezuela,
where we were both in exile.
And he told me the details.
We corresponded for years.
And he told me the kind of food they
would eat in the concentration camp or in the, or in the ship.
The distance, the weather, details
that you don't find in history books,
that a witness, someone who has lived it can give you.
[TYPING]
My daughter, Paula, died in 1992 of a rare disease.
And that broke my heart.
And I wrote a book called Paula, which
is a memoir about her and about the family
and about my country.
I didn't have the intention of publishing it.
I just needed to sort of exorcise
all the grief and the pain.
It's a book written with tears.
NARRATOR: "Then I felt my mother's hand in mine,
pulling me forward, and we walked to our bedside
and without a single tear, we offered you
the entire reservoir of our energy.
All the health and strength of our most recondite genes
from Basque sailors, and indomitable American Indians.
And in silence, we invoked all the gods known and yet
to be known, and the beneficent spirits of our ancestors
and the most formidable forces of life
to race to your rescue."
But the book was published, and it became very successful.
And I didn't want to touch any income that
came from that book, because it didn't belong to me.
It was Paula's.
So I thought, what would Paula do with this?
And she had worked all her life as a volunteer
with women and children.
And then I thought, well, I will create a small foundation where
I can do her work.
And that started to grow.
And we support more than 100 organizations
that work with women and girls.
And that's how it got started.
Now why do we focus on women?
Because when you help women, you help the family.
When you help a family, you change the community.
When the community is helped and evolves and grows,
you have an impact in the country.
The most backward and poor countries in the world
are those where women have the worst condition, where they
are submissive and repressed.
But we have many grantees that are extraordinary.
For example, one of them that I can think of right
now is called Olga Murray.
And she is this little old lady in tennis shoes
who is 94 or 96 years old, feisty,
dressed in bright colors, who has a foundation in Nepal.
She has saved from bondage and servitude
more than 15,000 girls.
She has orphanages, refuge for kids, and nutritional clinics,
and she has done all this alone.
Of course, people help her.
She gets help.
But it was her idea and her work.
That kind of hero, I want to be her.
That kind of hero is what I want in my books.
So those strong women, I don't make them up,
they're all around.