Interviewed by Arta Marku Qëndro
– ‘I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.’ This is how Isabel Allende replies when asked why she writes. I think it is the kind of answer that can be given by all writers. Everything must start from the need to tell a story. But this one here is an irrational terrain, so let’s start the conversation from a clearer and more easily explicable space: your beginnings as a writer. Because there must be a moment that you discovered this inner need. How would you describe the moment of discovering a writer in yourself - the moment you realized the need to tell a story?
Before it is a need, it is an almost a childish desire, but not to amaze anyone. It's like an invitation to discover, eyes closed, together with someone (whom you often neither know, nor see, nor will ever meet) things that are extremely vivid and yet invisible, neglected for entirely ordinary or even unjust reasons. I have started writing very early, but I always distinguish the winter of 1985 in Poradec[1]. That setting reminds me of a beautiful death, which seemed to surpass even life itself in many ways. Looking through the eyes of experience, it seems to me that the events that insist on being narrated are those whose ‘longevity’ in the memory is not guaranteed. This also awakens a compassion without which literature cannot live a very long life. (...)