Discovering a new favourite writer-Isabel Allende

I'm choosing carefully my favorite writers, and I prefer usually to read several works before listing him/her as one of my favorites, but it seems that I just picked up the right novel from Isabel Allende. However, I'm sure that very soon i will read more from her works as with the first one my attention was captivated and I can state that she is a great novelist. This feminist writer is from Chile, but living nowadays in California, had an interesting and adventurous life, she is a wife, mother, grandmother, friend and last but not least a successful, bestselling author. According to her, in every novel she is exploring a part of herself, in every story lies something more or less from her life or her personality.

I have just finished her novel entitled 'The Sum of Our Days' and it had a great impact on me. Isabel Allende has the gift to tell some facts which will become personal for the reader, will make him/her to think, to see life with different eyes and to be more grateful for what he/she has. This impressive memoir presents her family, each member having a very complex personality, sometimes even scandalous, though they are a great team, a 'tribe', as the writer defines it.
The narrative is very vivacious, giving an insight to the sorrows and joys of this unique family. It presents different moments of their lives, being very much concentrated on the pain of losing the beloved Paula, Isabel's daughter, to whom she is addressing directly in the novel very often. Sometimes it seems as a letter to Paula, telling what happened after her departure.

'The Sum of Our Days' is not a good memoir to read, it is an example of how to go on in life after a big loss, how to remember and have the memory of the beloved dead person with you every day without feeling pain, but acceptance, it is an experience of life. She writes about love, death, spiritualism, drug addiction and other aspects of life without making judgement, but making to reflect. Reading this novel wasn't just a lecture, it was an experience, and my next acquisition will be Isabel's novel 'Paula', written in the memory of her dead daughter, because I'm sure that she has very much more to offer with every novel, and especially with the memoir of her daughter.