THE SUM OF OUR DAYS: A Memoir
Isabel Allende
Harper
Memoir
ISBN: 9780061551833

"It's hard for me to let go of people," Isabel Allende said of her deceased daughter Paula. "[She] is unreachable; only in my love for her are we in contact. She comes in signs." Pretty intense, right? Well, buckle up my friends. If you delve into THE SUM OF OUR DAYS, Allende's most recent book, you will find a bumpy, funny, delectable, brutally honest and provocatively fascinating look into the private life of her extensive and complex brood of a family. Written in daily letters to her mother back in Chile, Allende pours out the deepest and darkest secrets of her extended family post-heartbreak, the early death of her only daughter. In the wake of her mourning, she weaves a long and wavy path to her true heart, and every word is riveting.

Allende is known as a "magic realist," her stock in trade as an author. However, there is little magic and lots of realism in THE SUM OF OUR DAYS. For a nation obsessed with "family values," its newest citizen goes completely against the traditional American grain with her topsy-turvy, emotionally harrowing life. Her second husband is a garrulous and outspoken attorney and advocate for illegal immigrants in the Bay area; his daughter is a drugged-out mess in and out of jail cells, which he hopes will teach her the "consequences" of her criminal acts; and her son is married to a former member of Opus Dei, who walks a straight (and completely bigoted) religiously fueled road. There are endless characters in THE SUM OF OUR DAYS, all the more intriguing because of the unflinching honesty and bright light that Allende shines on their every course of action, their every life decision, and the way that it intersects with her own difficult life.

The death of her daughter has been the subject of another book (simply titled PAULA). It is clear from the content of this memoir that her broken heart will never completely mend, and the well-established credo that no parent should have to bury a child is utmost in her mind. Allende pulls no punches when discussing the bottomless love she has for her children, in life as in death, and it is this moving portrayal of motherhood that gives great heart to the stories about her family members. This is really a book about not just the sum of her family's "days," but the sum of her own multitudinous adventures as writer, mother, wife, lover, daughter, activist, immigrant, teacher…

If you think that it would be an epic maneuver to pull it all into one book, you would be right. But Allende somehow finds just the right anecdotes about each member of the family to make the reader feel as if he or she was being escorted into the author's boudoir and seduced into the vortex of her life and longings. It is rare that desire has so many names, but Allende finds them all and, in short order, brings them to life on the page with a power that towers over so many of the recent memoirists in this popular genre. There are no lies here, there is no Frey or Burroughs amping up of actual life to ensure a chuckle or gulp from the reading public. Allende doesn't have to play tricks to make your heart and breath rise and fall, to make your stomach tumble each time Willie's indigent daughter almost dies (again!) or your heart break each time Allende looks back on a moment during her daughter's strangely quick descent into serious illness.

THE SUM OF OUR DAYS is exactly what a memoir should be: a heartfelt and candid look at the good, the bad and the oh-so-ugly that makes up a truly human life. Like reality TV, we are hooked and cannot look away, whether we like it or not. This is a rewarding emotional rollercoaster in which a world-renowned author searches for the same answers as the rest of us, sidestepping disaster upon disaster with a warmth of spirit and an everlasting hope that any reader will find unbearably inspiring.

    --- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

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