story is a part of her memory of her first secret sexual experience at the age of eight and of the moral crisis that ensued.

Celia Frias
Celia is Allende’s daughter-in-law, another example of the many radical conversions in the family: strictly religious and highly prejudiced at the time of her marriage to Allende’s son Nicolas, Celia becomes a free spirit in time, eventually giving birth at the home of her mother-in-law.

Michael Frias
Michael is the narrator’s first husband and the father of her three children; they meet in Santiago and marry young, after three years of chaste courtship. Michael is a member of an English family, which has lived in Chile for generations but maintains British mannerisms: he grows up treated like a ‘‘young lord,’’ taught to control and conceal his emotions. Although a patient and supportive husband, he becomes distant and emotionally estranged from the narrator, especially during the second half of their marriage, which is spent in exile. During that time, he works on a dam deep in the Venezuelan jungle and visits his family every six weeks. Allende has an affair with an Argentinian musician with whom she spends three months in Spain, but she cannot stay away from her children and comes back. Despite many attempts to remedy their marriage, the two eventually divorce.

Nicolas Frias
Allende’s son Nicolas is described as an imaginative albeit morbid teenager who tortures his mother with pretend suicides; eventually, he becomes an explorer-turned-computer expert. Nicolas is also very close to his sister and a great pillar of support for the narrator during Paula’s illness.

Paula Frias
The author’s daughter gives her name to this autobiography, as her tragic illness inspires Allende to write the book while taking care of her. Paula is the narrator’s first child and only daughter; born in 1963, she grows up during her mother’s professional rise in Chilean television. While her parents are at work and engaged in a lively social scene of 1960s Chile, Paula becomes ‘‘a complete lady in miniature’’ by the age of two in the hands of her paternal grandparents. Paula is spoiled yet mature, stubborn yet a quiet accomplice in acts of kindness— like hiding her grandmother’s drinking habit by burying the empty bottles in the yard. Paula’s idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt end when the family flees to Venezuela. There, Paula does volunteer work in the slums of Caracas, just as she helped classmates in post-coup Chile whose parents were persecuted by the new government.

After graduation, Paula marries Ernesto and moves to Spain with him; in a moment of clairvoyance, she writes a letter to be opened after her death, in which she bids everybody farewell. At the beginning of the book, she has just been confined to a hospital in Madrid, Spain, diagnosed with porphyria, a rare metabolic disease of the blood. Paula falls into a coma from which she never wakes up, and she dies exactly a year later.

Granny
Allende’s first mother-in-law and Paula’s paternal grandmother, Granny is a sensitive and loving English lady, who adores her grandchildren and spends the last years of her life taking care of them. With the social deterioration in Chile, she becomes depressed and turns to alcohol; after her grandchildren leave to seek exile in Venezuela, she loses touch with reality, repeatedly asks for them, and gradually dies—of alcoholism and loneliness.

Meme
The author has few memories of Meme, her maternal grandmother and Tata’s wife who passes away early in the narrator’s childhood, but her spirit seems to follow Allende throughout her life. Ethereal and mystical, the grandmother is a comforting presence and an essential part of the narrator’s inspiration. Meme was training her granddaughter to become a seer but died before Allende developed her mystical gifts; with her death, the household became quiet and cheerless.

Mother
Brought up in a sheltering world of wealth and privilege, Allende’s mother faces a life of disgrace after her divorce and suffers a long illness. Her health improves but her social status worsens when she falls in love with a married Chilean diplomat, Tio Ramon, whom she eventually marries. In the beginning of her second marriage, while the family lives in Lebanon, Allende’s mother becomes an ‘‘expert in the supreme art of keeping up appearances’’ due to the family’s modest income. Although often weakened by illness and stress, the narrator’s mother remains a pillar of strength and encouragement in her life. When Allende returns to Chile, the two maintain a rich daily correspondence and visit each other at times of crisis.

Pablo Neruda
Probably Chile’s most famous poet, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Pablo Neruda is a great influence in the narrator’s writing career. During her job as a reporter, Allende visits him for lunch, hoping to get an interview; however, the poet laughs at the idea, calling her the country’s worst journalist—lacking in objectivity, placing herself in the middle of all her stories, inventing and falsifying news. He finally gives her advice that will ultimately change her life: ‘‘Why don’t you write novels instead? In literature, those defects are virtues.’’

General Prats
One of Salvador Allende’s most loyal supporters, Prats dies with the defeat of his government in the military coup; however, the narrator salutes his ghost, which allegedly haunts the presidential palace during Pinochet’s reign to remind its occupants of the terror they have imposed on the country.

Tio Ramon
Tio Ramon is Allende’s stepfather, who enters her life shortly after her parents’ separation. Entirely smitten by the beauty and vulnerability of the narrator’s mother, he divorces his wife (with whom he has four children) and begins a life filled with financial struggles but entirely fulfilling. A diplomat assigned to various Chilean embassies, Tio Ramon takes his new family along and successfully weathers the many trials of raising another man’s children. When Salvador Allende becomes president, Ramon gets a high and well-paid post in Argentina, only to leave after the coup; in his old age and in exile, he looks for work in Venezuela. Intelligent and charming, never uttering a word of complaint, he sets an example of courage and optimism that follows the narrator through her life’s struggles.

Even though at their first meeting Allende declares she has ‘‘never seen such an ugly man’’ and becomes jealous of her mother’s attention given to this stranger, she eventually develops a deep respect and love for her new father, whose vivacity and fairy-tale imagination make the years of modest living feel like they are filled with splendor. Although tough and persistent in making the narrator face her insecurities, Tio Ramon is also disarmingly supportive of her: when his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter doesn’t want to go to a dance at her school in Lebanon out of fear of being the wallflower, he ‘‘closed the consulate and dedicated the afternoon to teach [her] to dance.’’

Tata
Tata is Allende’s grandfather. As a young man, he is described as exhibiting ‘‘the concentration and integrity that were his characteristics; he was made of the same hard stone as his ancestors and, like many of them, had his feet firmly on the ground.’’ Nevertheless, he marries his absolute opposite, a beautiful clairvoyant with telekinetic powers. In his old age, Tata remains a stubborn and proud man ‘‘who [believes] discomfort was healthful and that central heating sapped the strength.’’ When he develops a heavy cough and high fever, he drives himself into a stroke with self-imposed remedies: ‘‘He buckled a saddle cinch around his waist and when he had a coughing fit gave himself a brutal tug to ‘subdue his lungs’’’ and ‘‘tried to cure [the fever] with ice cold showers and large glasses of gin.’’

Allende acknowledges Tata’s influence in her development as a writer as she recalls the long conversations she had with him, stating: ‘‘My daily visits with Tata provided me with enough material for all the books I have written, possibly for all I will ever write.’’ She describes him as a ‘‘virtuoso storyteller, gifted with perfidious humor, able to recount the most hair-raising stories while bellowing with laughter.’’ While in exile, Allende hears that Tata is dying and begins to write him a letter— which becomes a best-selling novel.

Willie
Willie is the narrator’s second husband, a California lawyer with an aristocratic appearance and a frustratingly messy household life. The two meet after both of their lives have suffered a shipwreck of sorts, and they marry shortly thereafter. Allende falls in love with his life story and uses it in one of her novels.