Travels to nonfiction: Chile

When I started this worldreads challenge, I thought I'd only read fiction. I write fiction, after all, so of course I'd want to meet fiction from all over the world. Also, it's so often easier to tell truths in fiction. 

But when a friend from Chile recommended Isabel Allende's My Invented Country as the must-read book to get to know her country, I couldn't resist. 

It's not Allende's first memoir, so she doesn't feel compelled to tell facts as they happened. Instead, she tells her own truths as she remembers them, embracing the subjectivity of memory and the hypnotic power of nostalgia. After so many years of exile, she finds herself as much a stranger when she returns to Chile as she somehow always is in her new adopted country of California.