The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Isabel Allende (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

In this heartfelt memoir, Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of tragic loss—the death of her daughter, Paula. Recalling the past thirteen years from the daily letters the author and her mother, who lives in Chile, wrote to each other, Allende bares her soul in a book that is as exuberant and full of life as its creator. She recounts the stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her that becomes a new kind of family.

Throughout, Allende shares her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory. Here, too, are the amazing stories behind Allende’s books, the superstitions that guide her writing process, and her adventurous travels. Ultimately, The Sum of Our Days offers a unique tour of this gifted writer’s inner world and of the relationships that have become essential to her life and her work.

Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, The Sum of Our Days is a portrait of a contemporary family, bound together by the love, fierce loyalty, and stubborn determination of a beloved, indomitable matriarch.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this deeply revealing second memoir, after Paula, novelist Allende (The House of Spirits) utilizes her family and the complex network of their relationships as the linchpin of the narrative. While weaving in her candid opinions on love and marriage, friendship, drug addiction, the writing life and religious fanaticism, Allende continues to work through the grief over her daughter's death. In these years without you I have learned to manage sadness, making it my ally. Little by little your absence and other losses in my life are turning into a sweet nostalgia. And though Allende's insight is keen, her prose polished and her language hypnotic, it's the stories of her close-knit family that move the memoir forward. We lived as a tribe, Chilean style; we were almost always together. While much of the story is infused with melancholy, her world is by no means without humor, mirth and wisdom. She celebrates friends' triumphs and exploits their foibles, including the odyssey of the boobs, without taking herself too seriously. This is a book to savor. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

In this sequel to her memoir Paula (1995), about the year-long coma suffered by her daughter, Chilean novelist Allende tells of the difficult years following Paula’s death. She makes a transformative journey in these pages, from the moving opening chapter, in which the grief-stricken author and her family scatter Paula’s ashes in the forest, to the final rewarding coda, where she is able to once again experience contentment and gratitude for the abundance in her life. Framing her story around her family, and directly addressing her daughter throughout, Allende reveals herself in all her roles: feisty marital partner, intrusive mother, dedicated writer, and spiritual seeker. She takes great comfort from her wide circle of support, a loosely connected network she refers to as her tribe, which provides her with the “three-ring circus material” she needs for her writing. Among the many personal revelations she makes here are her daughter-in-law’s discovery that she is gay, which broke up her marriage to Allende’s son and launched the author into a laborious matchmaking process to help him remarry, and her own imbibing of a hallucinogenic tea, which subsequently helped awaken her imagination during the writing of her children’s books. Surprisingly candid, frequently funny, and highly aware of her own failings, Allende is a person fully engaged in life, and readers will find her eloquent memoir inspirational reading. --Joanne Wilkinson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper; First American Edition edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006155183X
• ISBN-13: 978-0061551833
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #417,100 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Peru and raised in Chile, Isabel Allende is the author of eight novels, including, most recently, Zorro, Portrait in Sepia, and Daughter of Fortune. She has also written a collection of stories; three memoirs, including My Invented Country and Paula; and a trilogy of children's novels. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and have become bestsellers across four continents. In 2004 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Isabel Allende lives in California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Clever, Funny, Charming Family Memoir, April 14, 2008

By 

SORE EYES - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (Hardcover)

The Sum Of Our Days is a family memoir based on Allende's idea that her deceased daughter Paula would want to know what has happened to the family since she died. Lacking in pretense and affectation, The Sum Of Our Days is an honest portrait of an unusual family, full of interest and charm.

Told through a series of short stories that could be letters to Paula's ghost (and were in fact culled from letters Allende wrote to her mother in Chile), The Sum Of Our Days describes a family that has survived drug addiction, death, betrayal and divorce to celebrate birth, travel, friendship and love. The heavy subject matter has been blessed with perspective and humor courtesy of time.

It's difficult to write about triumphing in hard times and not sound pompous or self-righteous. But who would lie to their deceased daughter? It's a clever way to tell a family story and the result for the reader is a good story well told.

This book is also available in the original Spanish version.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power of Family, May 24, 2008

By 

Patricia Kramer (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Wow, what a rollicking read. I kept having to remind myself that this was a memoir and not one of Allende's novels. Lesser women would have crawled into a hole having lived through the tragedy and day to day uproar of her life, but Isabel Allende just keeps drawing the hurt and struggling into her family circle and that extended family supports each other and moves forward together. She is truly a matriarch who, as she admits, sometimes needs to be reined in a bit.

Sometimes she needs to reach outside the family for support. That is when the "sisters of disorder" step in.

"Though I had just met her, I told her what was happening with you.
"We are going to pray for your daughter and for you", she told me. A
month later she invited me to her 'prayer circle,' and that is how
these new friends came to accompany me during your agony and death...
and continue to comfort me today. For me it is a sisterhood sealed in
heaven. Every woman in this world should have such a circle of
friends. Each of us is witness to the others; lives; we keep secrets,
help in difficulties, share experiences, and stay in almost daily
contact by e-mail. However far I may be traveling, I always have my
lie to terra firma: my sisters of disorder."

This book is a testament to the power of love of every kind. It is a gift to read.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Hmm..., August 11, 2008

By 

Linda (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Like most reviewers, I've enjoyed Allende's previous works, and I spent most of a Sunday afternoon wrapping up this latest offering. I can feel my furrowed brow as I type, because I don't know what to make of it. I enjoyed reading about the various members of Allende's "tribe" and at times wished I could join them. At other times I felt like the book was an infomercial. Clearly Allende is justifiably proud of her friends and family's accomplishments--her friend Tabra's jewelry business (I'll probably make a purchase shortly), her former daughter-in-law's Marin County mountain bike tour company, her husband's novels.

Allende also discusses her frequent travels around the globe with family members--annual trips to Chile to her mother, an African safari with her grandchildren, a trip to India with her husband and Tabra. I suspect the average reader can only dream of such adventures; am I envious? Allende and her husband can afford to be financially generous to their large family, and they obviously enjoy sharing their good fortune, but for a reason I still can't put my finger on, broadcasting that fact to devoted readers just smacked of Oprah to me.

Other reviewers had mentioned that they felt the book was written in haste, and poorly edited. Passages like this one simply didn't ring true for me: "I had shrunk an inch [she's 5 feet tall] and the body lolling in the water was that of a mature woman who had never been a beauty." I'm sure anyone who has seen photos of Ms. Allende would agree that she's stunning and quite beautiful. Had she been unattractive, I suspect her career might not have been as successful as it is.

I'm sure I'll be editing my review once I've given it more thought. For now, I agree with other reviewers that The Sum of Our Lives is not the best introduction to Allende's wonderful body of work. Start with House of the Spirits and work your way up through her earlier works to the current offering.