The Sum of Our Days

The Sum of Our Days is a memoir and the sequel to Isabel Allende's earlier memoir Paula, which chronicled her daughter Paula's illness and death. Written as a long letter to her deceased daughter, the book covers roughly 13 years of Allende's family life, beginning in 1993 and structured around the rituals, crises, and relationships that bind together what Allende calls her "tribe," an unconventional extended family in Marin County, California.

The memoir opens with Allende's annual January 8 writing ritual, a superstitious practice she has maintained for 25 years. Her literary agent, Carmen Balcells, urges her to write another memoir, insisting a professional writer must always choose the story over offending relatives. Drawing on decades of daily correspondence with her mother, Panchita, Allende begins.

She returns to December 1992, when her family scattered Paula's ashes in a forest near their home, following instructions Paula left before falling ill. Paula's widower, Ernesto, came from New Jersey; her father flew from Chile. Allende then recounts the crisis of Jennifer, the only daughter of her husband, Willie, a young woman trapped in severe drug addiction. Once the best student in her class, Jennifer by 26 looked 60. She escaped repeatedly from hospitals, and a young evangelical Christian who tried to save her was beaten to death in a bar. Despite predictions that her body could not carry a child, Jennifer announced she was pregnant.

Allende describes her grief-stricken state in 1993, when she toured the United States promoting her novel The Infinite Plan. She was consumed by guilt over not recognizing medical incompetence at the Madrid hospital where Paula fell into a coma. She worried about her son Nico, who had been diagnosed with porphyria, the same hereditary metabolic condition that contributed to Paula's illness, and about whether his children might also carry it. She provides background on her relationship with Willie: They met in 1987 and married quickly so she could obtain citizenship and bring her children from Venezuela, where they had lived as political refugees after fleeing Chile's military dictatorship.

Jennifer's baby, Sabrina, was born two months premature, testing positive for multiple toxic substances. Jennifer fled the hospital, and Child Protective Services intervened. A fierce conflict erupted between Allende and Willie over who should raise the child. Willie, exhausted and afraid of another devastating loss, refused. Allende turned to her prayer circle, the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder, who had supported her since Paula's diagnosis. Through the circle, she connected with Fu, a Buddhist nun directing a Zen Center, and her partner Grace, a physician. They became Sabrina's foster mothers and eventually adopted her.

Meanwhile, Allende's daughter-in-law Celia gave birth to Nicole, and Allende finished writing Paula, enriched by the love letters Ernesto sent her. Celia, mourning her own grandmother's death in Venezuela, grew dangerously thin. Allende and Willie's marriage nearly collapsed under the weight of grief and Willie's family history of addiction. A therapist identified their core problem as sadness rather than anger and asked them not to say the word "divorce" for three weeks. They never spoke it again.

Jennifer disappeared. Willie searched jails, hospitals, and federal agencies without success. A psychic claimed Jennifer had been killed; the possibility haunted him. Fu and Grace held a memorial ceremony at the Zen Center, giving Jennifer the Buddhist name U Ka Dai Shin, meaning "wings of fire, great heart."

Allende introduces her closest friend, Tabra, a jewelry maker who endured brutal domestic violence throughout her marriage and later built a successful business in Berkeley employing Asian refugees. Tabra becomes a recurring source of counsel and comic relief, from her disastrous breast implant surgeries to her eventual bankruptcy, when she lost everything and moved into the room that had been Paula's in Allende's home to rebuild her craft piece by piece.

The publication of Paula brought an overwhelming response, including a letter from a nurse in Madrid confirming that medical negligence caused Paula's brain damage. Allende decided to donate all income from the book to a cause Paula would have approved, planting the seed for her foundation. A trip to India then provided two turning points. A woman under an acacia tree tried to give Allende her newborn baby girl because, their guide explained, no one wanted a girl. This encounter inspired Allende to establish a foundation for women and children. The second event came at three in the morning in a maharajah's palace, when Celia called from California to announce she was bisexual.

Celia had begun a relationship with Sally, the girlfriend of Jason, Willie's stepson. Jason was a talented young man studying journalism at Columbia University in New York. The revelation unfolded over Thanksgiving weekend: Celia confessed to Nico, and Sally told Jason by phone. Jason felt doubly betrayed. The divorce reshaped the family. The three children, including Andrea, Nico and Celia's middle daughter, alternated weeks between households. Celia and Sally faced social ostracism. Nico became withdrawn. Jason remained in New York, unable to trust women for years. Allende secretly maintained her friendship with Celia, lying to Nico, which created further conflict when the children revealed her deception.

Allende and Tabra conspired to find Nico a new partner. Through a photographer friend, they identified Lori Barra, a graphic designer from New York. They invited Lori on an Amazon trip to test her character, and she passed every challenge. She and Nico married in January 1999, and Lori transformed his home and life with warmth and stability. Lori desperately wanted children of her own, but all fertility treatments failed, including three surrogate implantations carried by Juliette, a friend who had volunteered. Lori and Nico received the final negative result in Tokyo, embracing in a deserted street at dawn. After a year of physical and emotional collapse, Lori emerged transformed, fully accepting Nico's three children as her own. Her design career having collapsed, Lori took charge of Allende's foundation, focusing on education, health, and protection for women and girls.

Allende wrote a trilogy of adventure novels for her grandchildren and, to overcome creative blocks, underwent a ceremony with ayahuasca, a psychoactive Amazonian brew used in spiritual rituals. She ranked the resulting visions alongside Paula's death as one of the two most transformative events of her life.

The family weathered September 11, the Iraq War, and ongoing crises. Allende and Willie built a Chilean-style country estate on a hilltop that Willie named "The House of the Spirits." Abuela Hilda, the beloved adopted grandmother who had been with the family for over 30 years, died in Madrid; her last words were to ask for her purse because Paula had come to get her. When Andrea developed sudden pneumonia, the entire divided family reunited at her bedside, and Allende observed that in emergencies, the family shed everything nonessential and was left with love.

The memoir closes with Allende and Willie at a desert spa, where they encountered Magdalena Pacheco, the daughter of a Mexican worker whose wrongful death case Willie had fought for years. Alone under a starlit sky, Allende told Willie she was tired of slaying dragons and wanted him to take care of her. He replied that he had been her prince for nearly 20 years, but she had never noticed. Allende reflects that the sum of their shared days has become their destiny, a recognition that her lifelong self-reliance had prevented her from fully accepting his love.