'The Sum of Our Days' by Isabel Allende (AP)

"The Sum of Our Days" (Harper Collins. 320 pages. $26.95), by Isabel Allende: Isabel Allende's central characters are often defiant women who expect no favors from life. They are not damsels in distress but Amazons who slay their own dragons, she points out in her new memoir.

In "The Sum of Our Days," Allende takes her readers by the hand and tells them of her own battles, bringing them into the turbulent lives of her "clan," as Allende refers to the cluster of relatives and close friends who surround her, and sharing with them the effort and the stories behind her books.

This glimpse allows the reader to understand why Allende is drawn to telling stories of women with guts. Life has forced the Peruvian-born author, who was raised in Chile, to slay her share of dragons -- from the pain of losing a daughter to the sleepless nights spent worrying about her next book. This memoir is a look at how she has faced down those challenges while retaining her grace, lipstick and high heels (the "athletic shoes" her American husband gave her lay for years in their box "like new," she says).

"The Sum of Our Days" is a sequel to "Paula," the gut-wrenching memoir Allende wrote as a letter to her daughter as she lay in a coma. Like that book, it is also written as a letter, meant to update Paula on what's been happening in the world and within their unconventional family since her untimely death in 1992.

The tone, reminiscent of conversations between good friends during a long walk, or exchanges over tea late at night, is intimate and raw, and so are the stories Allende tells.

Everything is grist for her writer's mill.

Starting on the day the family gathered to spread Paula's ashes in a stream surrounded by redwoods, Allende describes how, with the strong hand of a matriarch, she helped her extensive family navigate through deaths, infidelities, divorces, drug addiction and bankruptcy, even as the outside world shuddered under the weight of events from the Oklahoma City bombing to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Related stories branch out from the main narrative as they tend to in a rambling heart-to-heart among friends. In that way, the reader learns not only, say, about how a heroin addiction is destroying her husband's daughter and bringing him immense suffering. Allende goes on to tell of the child this woman had before dying, of that baby's struggle to live with the health consequences of her mother's addiction, and of the unconditional support she found with two adoptive moms, one of whom is a Buddhist nun.

But Allende knows her craft, and by the time she is done weaving her tales and tucking in all the loose threads, the reader sees nothing is superfluous here. All the stories and the characters who inhabit them are an essential part of Allende's personal life and of her writing, and knowing them helps the reader understand the author and her work.

Allende uses these stories to reveal, with humor and unflinching candor, some of her weaknesses and insecurities.

Repeatedly throughout the book, she acknowledges being a little too overbearing in her attempts to "fix" the lives of those around her, often running roughshod over the boundaries of privacy. She shows up at her newly married son's house before dawn to kiss her grandchildren awake, regularly surprising her new daughter-in-law coming out of the shower; on one occasion, she surprises the couple by rearranging their living room to accommodate her gift of a new carpet.

She promises them she'll stop, she tells herself and the reader she will reform, but then she admits she's sure to fall back on her old ways, at least occasionally. You can almost hear her sigh.

The book also reveals much about Allende's approach to writing, which is in equal parts inspiration, hard work and catharsis. It serves a very concrete purpose in the author's life. As she writes about the difficulties she faces, she's processing them, pushing them through her mill, grinding up pain and sorrow too tough to digest.

Through her writing, and the support of her clan, she turned the searing pain of her daughter's death into a dull throbbing sadness that is more bearable -- a weight that she can live with and not cave under. And she produced a book that draws in the reader like a good conversation with an old friend.