GRIEF AND REBIRTH

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/SAUSALITO

ISABEL ALLENDE, the distinguished Chilean writer, was celebrating the publication of one of her novels at a Barcelona party in December 1991, when she got word that her daughter was in a hospital in Madrid. She flew to her side. "I love you too, Mama," the 27-year-old Paula murmured just before she was seized by convulsions and fell into a coma. She never woke up, and a year later she died in Allende's arms. "I had a choice," the author recalls. "Was I going to commit suicide? Sue the hospital? Or was I going to write a book that would heal me?"

Paula (Harper Collins; 330 pages; $24) the memoir Allende began on yellow pads as she sat in the hospital, is written as an anguished letter to her daughter, who suffered from porphyria--a metabolic disorder that is rarely fatal. "They told me she would wake up in a week or two," the writer says. But months passed at Paula's bedside before Allende learned that a hospital mishap had caused irreversible brain damage. "It was destiny--and it was bad luck. After they told me, I went on writing because I could not stop. I could not let anger destroy me."

The book, as much a celebration of Allende's turbulent life as the chronicle of Paula's death, is a best seller in the U.S., Latin America and Europe. It has brought a new audience to the author, 52, who wrote her first novel, The House of the Spirits, at 40, when she was an exile in Venezuela after the murder of her cousin, former Chilean President Salvador Allende. That novel, in the magical realist style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was made into a 1994 film with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Altogether, Allende's four novels and a short-story collection have sold an estimated 10 million copies worldwide. Paula is her first nonfiction work--a book, she says, "I have been rehearsing all my life to write."

In a shingled cottage in Sausalito a block from San Francisco Bay, Allende surrounds herself with mementos: Paula's baby shoes, encased in copper; photographs of her, framed in silver; the earthen jar that contains Paula's ashes; and a letter Paula wrote during her honeymoon, foreseeing her own death. Petite and intense, Allende pours mango tea by a vase of wildflowers in the sunlit room. "All my books come from deep emotion," she says. "They are not born in my mind, they gestate in my womb." Her eyes welling with tears, she spreads across the table the handcrafted cards she uses to respond to a flood of letters from Paula readers. "They share their emotions," she says, "mothers with lost children, young people longing for a sense of family, doctors who say they will never see patients the same way. I answer each letter by hand."

Allende's life story, teeming with picaresque characters and improbable adventures, reads like her novels. In Paula she weaves it, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes abruptly, between graphic passages on her daughter's illness, Allende's own despair, and her metaphysical meditations on the life of the spirit. If the line between fact and fiction seems to blur, Allende explains, "magical realism is not a literary device; it's how I live." Growing up in Santiago, she remembers the great aunt "who at the end of her life began to sprout the wings of a saint," and the clairvoyant grandmother who, Allende insists, could move a sugar bowl across the table with her mere gaze. And she tells of how, at eight, she was molested by a fisherman and found him dead the next morning.

As an adolescent, Allende spent time in La Paz and Beirut with her mother and diplomat stepfather. She returned to Chile at 15, married an Anglo-Chilean engineer at 20 and worked as a journalist on women's and children's magazines. After her cousin's overthrow, she became caught up in the resistance to the dictatorship and was forced into a financially pinched and emotionally isolated exile in Venezuela. Eventually her marriage fell apart, just as her literary career took off. In 1988, on a book tour in California, she fell in love "at first sight" with, and married, an American lawyer, William Gordon. It was to their house that she brought Paula, in the final months of her coma, so she could die at home.

In the room where Paula died, however, a few months later there was a birth: of Allende's third grandchild, a daughter, to Paula's brother, Nicolas. Today Allende is focused on being "the perfect grandmother"; her grandchildren "live 13 minutes away--I have counted it," and photos of them are interspersed with Paula's on her bookshelves. "Paula's dying and my grandchildren growing up are tied together in an organic way," she says. "I finally understood what life is about; it is about losing everything. Losing the baby who becomes a child, the child who becomes an adult, like the trees lose their leaves. So every morning we must celebrate what we have."