In December 1991 my daughter Paula, who had a rare genetic condition called Porphyry, fell in a coma in Spain. Neglect in the Intensive Care Unit caused severe brain damage, and she ended up in a vegetative state. We took her home to California and cared for her until she died in my arms, a year later. Paula's long agony was an ordeal for our family. It went from bad to worse when a few months later Willie's daughter, Jennifer, died of an overdose. They say that there is no pain as great as that of losing a child... Mourning did not bring Willie and me closer. We are strong and stubborn people, I suppose we could not admit that our hearts were broken. It took a long time and a lot of therapy for us to be able to embrace and cry together.

After Paula's death, writing was the only thing that kept me relatively sane. Grief was a long journey into the underworld, it was like walking alone in a dark tunnel. My way of walking through the tunnel was to write. Every morning I dragged myself out of bed and went to my office, I would light a candle in front of Paula's picture, turn on the computer and start to cry. Often the pain was unbearable and I would stare at the screen for hours, incapable of writing a word. Other times the sentences would just flow, like dictated from the Beyond by Paula herself. A year later I was at the end of the tunnel, I could see light and I discovered, amazed, that I had written another book and that I didn't pray to die anymore, I wanted to live.

My book PAULA is a memoir, the tragic story of the untimely death of a young woman, but mainly a celebration of life. Two stories intertwine in those pages: that of my daughter Paula, and my own adventurous destiny. Her long agony gave me a unique opportunity to review my past. For a whole year my life stopped completely, there was nothing to do, only wait and remember. Slowly, I learned to see the patterns of my existence and asked myself all the fundamental questions: What is there at the other side of life? Is it only night, silence and solitude? What remains when there are no more desires, memories or hope?

After I finished that memoir, I could not write fiction for almost three years. I thought that my well of stories and the need to tell them had dried forever. And then I remembered that I am a journalist by training and if I am given a subject and time to research, I can write about almost anything. Well, not sports or politics...! I gave myself a subject as removed from grief as possible and ended up writing APHRODITE, a divagation about lust and gluttony, the only deadly sins that are worth the trouble.

The research for that book, done mostly in the porn shops of the gay neighborhood of San Francisco, pulled me out of the depression and brought me back to my body. The first symptom was an erotic dream. I dreamt that I placed a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, slathered him with guacamole and salsa, rolled him up and ate him... The therapy of writing about food and love worked and shortly after publishing APHRODITE I started a novel about the Gold Rush in California, called DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE. It is the story of Eliza Sommers, an orphan girl, raised by a British family in the Chilean port of Valparaíso in the mid nineteenth century. At sixteen Eliza goes to the California gold rush following her lover. I thought I was writing a love story, but really this novel is about freedom, a recurrent theme in my life. Like Eliza Sommers, I was determined from very early on to find my own way. That made me a feminist at a time and in a place where feminism was the equivalent of Satanic possession.

That novel was followed by PORTRAIT IN SEPIA, also a historical novel, this time placed in Chile during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is the story of Aurora del Valle, the granddaughter of Eliza Sommers. Although this book is not a sequel, because it can be read independently, it picks up several characters from DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE and some of my first novel, THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. These three books can be considered a trilogy. Aurora del Valle suffers a trauma at a very early age and she blocks her past: she can't remember those years. Her quest is to unravel the mysteries of her life and the family secrets. PORTRAIT IN SEPIA is a novel about memory. Also this theme, like freedom, is particularly relevant in my own life. I have been traveling always, I don't really belong anywhere. My roots are in my memory. Every book is a journey into the past, into the soul, and into memory.

A historical novel is a fascinating endeavor. While writing the three novels of this trilogy I entered a time machine and went back to 1848, all the way to 1973: a span of more than a hundred years. Can you imagine the research this endeavor required?

In 2001 I wrote a novel for children and young adults: THE CITY OF THE BEASTS. It was so much fun! It is the story of Alexander Cold, a fifteen years old American boy who goes in a trip to the Amazon, where he meets a strange girl called Nadia Santos. Together they experience a magic adventure among Stone Age Indians. I hope to write more novels with the same protagonists, the idea of a series is very tempting.

All fiction is ultimately autobiographical. I write about love and violence, about death and redemption, about strong women and absent fathers, about survival. Most of my characters are outsiders, people who are not sheltered by the society, who are unconventional, irreverent, defiant.