It’s the birthday of Isabel Allende (b. 1942), who writes novels of magical realism that are almost as wacky and fantastical as the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, and that’s saying something. Allende’s best known works probably include The House of the Spirits (1982), Eva Luna (1987), and City of the Beasts (2002).

Allende was born in Lima, Peru, to Chilean parents; her father was a diplomat but abandoned the family, and Allende’s mother took her back to Chile. Her mother then married another diplomat and the family moved a lot, with Allende attending schools in Bolivia and Beirut before the family returned to Chile. Allende married her first husband in 1962 and had a daughter and a son but also became a journalist (possibly “…the worst journalist in the country,” according to Pablo Neruda, who advised her to become a novelist instead) until her relative, President Salvador Allende, was assassinated; she eventually ended up on the wanted lists and escaped to Venezuela, where she lived for 13 years.

It was while living in Venezuela that Allende wrote The House of the Spirits, which began as a letter to her terminally ill 99 year old grandfather. The novel tells the saga of three generations of the Trueba family, including the matriarch Clara, who has premonitions and can move objects with her mind—typical mom stuff—and the patriarch Esteban, someone you wouldn’t want to leave alone with your daughter. The novel is a terrifically entertaining read and I think involves only one severed head, but as I might be misremembering the number of severed heads, consider yourself warned. House of the Spirits was an immediate bestseller, won Best Novel of the Year in Chile, and has been translated into more than 35 languages.

Allende, who divorced her first husband in 1987, met and married her second husband in 1988, and has lived in the U.S. since the early 1990s, has credited García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude with making her want to become a writer. Allende has written a host of other novels, including A Long Petal of the Sea (due out in 2020), about two young people who marry for survival as they flee to Chile in the wake of the Spanish civil war. Allende has also written several works of nonfiction, including Paula (1994), a letter to her daughter, who died in 1992, and Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (1997), in which Allende shares her knowledge of aphrodisiacs, complete with some handy family recipes. So there’s that. (Allende and her second husband divorced after 27 years of marriage; she has blamed the fact that between the two of them, they have lost three adult children.)

Have a splendid Friday reading some crazy good fiction and stay scrupulously honest to the data.