Sunset Park Book Discussion: The Soul of A Woman and short stories by Isabel Allende

Celebrate Women's History Month with a discussion of Isabel Allende's The Soul of A Woman, a passionate and inspiring meditation on what it means to be a woman. We will also read a few stories from Allende's The Stories of Eva Luna: 

-Two Words

-Clarisa 

-Letters of Betrayed Love 

-Phantom Palace

-And of Clay Are We Created 

These stories can be read in full on the Internet Archive. 

 

Copies of Soul of A Woman are available for checkout from the front desk. Registration is required.

 

More on The Soul of A Woman: 

"When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating," begins Isabel Allende. As a child, she watched her mother, abandoned by her husband, provide for her three small children without "resources or voice." Isabel became a fierce and defiant little girl, determined to fight for the life her mother couldn't have.

As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, she rode the first wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists, she for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin, as they wrote "with a knife between their teeth" about women's issues. She has seen what has been accomplished by the movement in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three passionate marriages, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner, when to step away, and the rewards of embracing one's sexuality.

So what feeds the soul of all women–and feminists–today? To be safe, to be valued, to live in peace, to have their own resources, to be connected, to have control over their bodies and lives, and above all, to be loved. On all these fronts, there is much work to be done, and this book, Allende hopes, will "light the torch of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us, as we lived for our mothers, and carry on with the work still left to be finished."