Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Author Isabel Allende knows how she wants to die: “At home, with warm socks and a dog. Any dog is fine.
Could be my dog or any other dog. Just a dog.” The 81-year-old Chilean writer says that with any animal — dogs, cats, even birds — her heart is completely open.
She is a better person around them: kinder, more tolerant, more patient, funnier and happier. “Any dog in the street makes me happy,” Allende says. “But because I now live in California, I have to ask permission to touch someone’s dog.
Once I do, we end up kissing.” To satisfy her dog walker’s three-year-old granddaughter, who visits every Tuesday and Thursday evening and badgers her to read one book repeatedly, the author wrote Perla: The Mighty Dog , featuring her rescue dog of the same name. Perla came to Allende via her second husband, Willie, from whom she separated in 2015, aged 72.
Upon his death in 2019, she acquired the small, smart and now unwanted pet. Allende’s endearingly illustrated picture book is inspired by an attack at the local dog park, when her hound roared and scared off a bulkier animal. “The story is about bullies,” she says.
“They are cowards and you have to stand up to them. Kids confront bullying at school, especially a kid like Nico in the book, who has glasses and is not athletic. In the same sense that a kid confronts that in school, I have been disrespected, pushed around and ignored.
I think mo.
