My mother was not only beautiful, she was also vulnerable and cried all the time, which is very attractive because it makes even the wimpiest man feel strong. She had many suitors but ended up marrying the ugliest of them all. My step-father looked like a frog, but in time he turned into a prince, and now I can swear that he is almost handsome. He has a noble heart, but he is as patriarchal as my grand-father was. I had no choice but to fight him. Rebellion was the only way for a girl to survive in my family.

My step-father was a diplomat and soon after he entered our lives we started traveling. In l958 we were living in Lebanon. That year began the political violence that would eventually tear the country apart. My brothers and I were sent back to Chile and I ended up living again in my grand-father's home. I was fifteen and so tired of saying good-by to places and people, that I decided that I would plant my roots in Chile and never travel again.

In my childhood I saw my mother as a victim. She was powerless. The only times she got attention was when she was sick, so she was sick a lot. Obviously, I did not want to be like her, I wanted to be like my grand-father. I nearly succeeded, but around my twelfth birthday Nature betrayed me and two little prunes appeared on my chest. From being an assertive tough tom-boy, overnight I became a giggling insecure girl with pimples and no waistline whose main concern was to be liked by the opposite sex. I didn't have a lot of raw material, I was short and angry. I couldn't conceal my contempt for most boys, because it was obvious to me that I was smarter. It took me years to learn to act silly so that men would feel superior.

I was the most unhappy adolescent in the history of humankind. I hated myself. I contemplated becoming a nun to hide the fact that I would never lure a husband. You can imagine my surprise and delight when the first young man proposed. I was barely fifteen and already so desperate that I clung to him like a crab, married at nineteen, had two children by age twenty three, and remained married for twenty five eternal years. The first fifteen years were happy, we were really in love and we had two wonderful kids, Paula and Nicolas. For a while everything seemed fine. My career as a journalist was successful and I was well known for my feminist and humorous columns and TV programs.

I had been raised to follow my mother's footsteps. Remember, this was the fifties and early sixties. Ideally I would ignore any personal ambition, control my anger, repress my imagination and deny my sexuality. It never quite worked.

During my youth in Chile I worked as a journalist and I also wrote theater plays and children's stories. I always wanted to be a writer, but that was almost unthinkable for a woman in that time and in that environment. Women of my generation in Chile were not supposed to be creative or successful, that was a man's destiny. We were supposed to be ladies, to behave nicely, be a good mother, a good wife and a good citizen (which I was, believe me). But I had acquired the vice of storytelling at a rather early age. My mother says that no sooner had I learned to speak, I was already torturing my poor brothers with morbid tales that filled their days with terror and their dreams with nightmares. Later my children had to go through the same ordeal. I have been telling stories since I remember, but I became a fiction writer when I was almost forty. Before I did not have self-confidence and I was too busy raising a family and working for a living.