order and disorder

Excerpts from a Democracy Now! interview with Isabel Allende:

If I can write it, I can cope. And I’ve been writing many books, but in every book I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I see the world in terms of stories.

I was trying to explain that writing a novel is putting a pack of lies together to get to a truth, to the truth. Without that truth, the novel doesn’t work. In a memoir, it works like the other way around. You work with the truth, and then you end up lying, because my version of what happened is different from the version of everybody else in the family, you know.

Tell us about the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder.
I have a little prayer group. We call it “prayer group,” although we pray very little. We mostly talk. And it’s six women that we get together on Tuesdays, and we witness each other’s lives. We help each other, but it’s not therapy. We meditate. And we are always in touch through the email. I had the feeling that I belonged in the United States when I met these women and I found this sisterhood. I think that every woman in the world should have a circle of women. It’s very empowering.

Maybe everybody should. Have a great weekend. Hang out with your 'hood. See you Monday.

Fishing, woodblock by Joshua Rome