A Conversation with Isabel Allende
Which of your male characters do you like best? Remember that Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!”
Gregory Reeves, in The Infinite Plan. I like him so much that in real life, I married him some years ago, and not even marriage has made me stop liking him.
The Infinite Plan is based on the life of your husband, William Gordon. How much is fiction and how much reality?
I don’t honestly know. I think all my books, with the exception of Eva Luna and a few stories, are much more reality than fiction. In The Infinite Plan, the characters are based on human models, and nearly everything that happens is real. Sometimes I needed two people to create a character, as was the case with Carmen/Tamar. The models were Carmen Alvarez, a childhood friend of Willie’s, and Tabra Tunoa, my good friend, who gave me her biography to use for Tamar. Gregory Reeves was very easy, since Willie was the model. . . . I didn’t have to invent the character; it was there, waiting for me. No need to exhaust my imagination.
“In The Infinite Plan, the characters are based on human models, and nearly everything that happens is real.”
What was Willie’s reaction when he read the book? Weren’t you afraid he would be horrified to find himself exposed in those pages, with all his problems and faults?
My mother said it would lead to a divorce, but none of it was a surprise to him because we had discussed each chapter. When I met him and he began to tell me the story of his life, I knew I had to write it, and I think that was why I fell so quickly and deeply in love. From the very beginning, I told him what I had in mind; there was nothing hidden. I spent four years sleeping with that story, checking details, asking questions, visiting the places where events had occurred, interviewing dozens of people. When he read the book, Willie told me, he was deeply moved: “This is a map of my life; now I understand where I’ve been.” The danger with that, of course, is that now he thinks he’s Gregory Reeves and goes around worrying about who will play him in the film. He thinks Paul Newman is a little short. . . .
“When I met [Willie] and he began to tell me the story of his life, I knew I had to write it, and I think that was why I fell so quickly and deeply in love.”
Taken from Isabel Allende: Life and Spirits, Celia Correas Zapata, Arte Publico Press, 2002