When Meme dies, a distraught Allende tries to communicate with her spirit by leaving notes hidden around the house. She discusses moving back from Peru and being sent to various schools where she clashed with the nuns due to her stubbornness. Allende goes on to recount several other stories from her childhood and early life. However, this has little effect on her condition. Allende urges the doctors to take Paula off oxygen in an attempt to get her to recover from the coma. Allende worries that she is unable to let Paula go, and is envious of the way her husband is more able to accept that Paula’s fate is in God’s hands. She talks about some of the logistics of caring for her, such as how she and her husband take shifts sitting up at Paula’s bedside. In the next section, Allende discusses finding out that Paula was critically ill in the hospital. Tomas was involved in a scandal and lost his fortune, and Allende’s mother discreetly returned to Chile with Allende and her brothers. Allende’s mother was alone in a new country, and soon had several children to take care of. Tomas wed Allende’s mother soon afterward, and then Tomas was given a position at the Chilean embassy in Peru. Tata took Allende’s mother to Spain to help her forget Tomas, but they were quickly forced to return home when World War II broke out. She fell in love with the rakish Tomas Allende, but Tata and Meme did not approve of the match. They had eight children, of whom Allende’s mother was the youngest, as well as the only girl. She describes the whirlwind courtship between her grandfather Tata and grandmother Meme, who married when Meme was still very young. Through a combination of luck, hard work, and good investments, they become wealthy. She begins writing about her grandparents, who immigrated to Chile from Spain. In between accounts of the day-to-day happenings at the hospital, Allende begins to discuss her personal and family history. She begins writing to Paula, adopting a format that is a cross between a letter and a series of diary entries. The book begins with Allende sitting at her daughter’s side in the hospital. However, after it became clear that Paula would not awake from the coma, Allende expanded the piece, adding on sections detailing episodes from Allende’s life and family history. Allende began the book after Paula slipped into a coma due to her condition, intending it as a record of everything that Paula was missing which she could read after she recovered. Published in 1994, it was intended as a tribute to Allende’s daughter Paula, who died from medical complications related to porphyria in 1991. Paula is a memoir by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende.
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