Award-winning author becomes a Barbie: How Isabel Allende landed 'in very good company'

When Isabel Allende says "Just a minute," you wait ? even if you have only 15 minutes with one of the century's most celebrated Latin American authors.

In the middle of a recent Zoom interview, the award-winning Chilean American author, who is getting the Barbie treatment as Mattel's latest Inspiring Women doll, steps out of frame to secure a step stool and reach up in her shelves for a miniature plastic version of herself.

"I'm so short that I need a ladder for everything," she quips as she holds up the doll, beaming: "This is me."

The author's Inspiring Women doll, released two days shy of Hispanic Heritage Month (which runs Sept. 15-Oct. 15), exudes the same elegance and fierceness as its life-sized counterpart. Donning a bold red dress with a gathered cape that drapes over the shoulder, the new Barbie is accessorized with gold statement earrings, black chic heels and bright red lips – the author's signature look.

The journalist turned novelist feels "honored that they would choose me." Other women celebrated by Barbie's Inspiring Women series, which launched in 2018, include Dr. Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo, Billie Jean King, Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt. "I'm in very good company," she adds.

The doll also features the author's beloved pet pup, Perla, and a miniature replica of "The House of the Spirits," Allende's first novel and international bestseller written while she was in exile from the Chilean military coup. (The 1982 novel has since been banned in Chile and challenged in schools in North Carolina and Modesto, California.)

The "Daughter of Fortune" author hopes her Barbie is "inspiring for girls who want to write" and help them believe "you can make it ? with a lot of effort and discipline ? but you can do it."

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For Allende, becoming a writer was "almost too ambitious … there were no role models. At the time when I was born, and in the place where I was born and the family I was born into, girls were supposed to get married and have children and try to help their husbands get somewhere in life. That was it."

Now 82, Allende has published more than 25 books, which have sold over 77 million copies and translated into more than 40 languages. In 2023, she announced a publishing deal to write three children's books ("Perla, The Mighty Dog" released in May) and has already shipped out for print her upcoming 2025 novel "My Name Is Emilia Del Valle."

"I was always in the periphery of reading and writing," she says. "Then I became a journalist, and then I could finally write, learn to research and use language and conduct an interview ? all those things were fascinating to me ? but then we had a military coup (in Chile) in 1973 and I had to get out of my country and I couldn't work as a journalist." (She lived in exile in Venezuela for 13 years.)

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Eventually, she found her way back to writing. "I could not write until 1981, when my grandfather was dying in Chile. We got the news on January 8," she says. "I started a letter for him that became my first novel. My grandfather died a month later and, of course, never read the letter."

Ever since, Allende begins writing all her books on that date ? to honor her grandfather but also for discipline. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to get anything done," she says. "If I don't give myself an assignment, who will do it? If I don't say to myself, 'Show up every morning in front of your computer and write for several hours,' who will do it? I don't have a boss … so I give myself a time to start."

Giving herself a deadline, however, is a different story. "You never know how long a novel might take," she says. "In keeping that journalistic discipline in mind, I write every day. Since I became a writer 42 years ago, this is all I do. I write."

Writing never gets boring for Allende, but "I have been blocked," she says. "After my daughter died in 1992, I just couldn't do anything. There was a sort of void around me."

Naturally, she turned to her craft to make sense of that emptiness. In 1995, three years after her daughter Paula Frías Allende died at only 29 years old, the author published "Paula," a memoir written, in part, during the long hours she spent in the hospital with her daughter while she was in a coma.

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"But then after (writing "Paula"), I couldn't do anything," the author says. "After a couple of years, I decided that I am a journalist by training, and if I am given a subject and enough time to research, I can write almost anything. So I gave myself a subject that would be as removed as possible from death and grieving and mourning and pain, and I wrote a sort of happy book that pulled me out of the writer's block.

"Since then, I've been writing nonstop."

Allende is now considered the world's most widely read living Spanish-language author. Her writing has also been recognized by former President Barack Obama, who in 2014 bestowed her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom; in 2018, she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation; and in 2004, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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From displacement after the Chilean coup to personal tragedy, Allende hasn't let those experiences define her but rather embolden her work. During a time when women's rights are being stripped away, Allende hopes sharing her story with Mattel through her Barbie will teach the next generation that "they can be the main characters of their own stories."

There is strength in numbers, she says.

"It's very hard to achieve anything alone, especially if you want to create a movement or create change. You need sisters, you need to be connected, to be informed, to be educated, and connection is essential. I would have never done anything in my life without the help of other women."

You can purchase the Isabel Allende Barbie Inspiring Women Collectible doll here.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Isabel Allende landed 'in very good company' with her own Barbie