IN HER previous house in California, the one where her daughter died, the novelist Isabel Allende secreted in the basement a plastic skeleton, a treasure map and trunks filled with fake jewels. The creepy surprises were intended to be discovered by her grandchildren. The idea was to jump-start their imaginations, just as hers had been by her own magical and sinister family.

In the dungeon of Allende’s family history in Chile lurked a clairvoyant grandmother who could make a table dance across a room, a grandfather who, travelling home on the bus, saw the Devil (green cloven hooves and all) and an aunt whose shoulder blades sprouted angel wings. Most disturbing, when Allende wasn’t plotting to kill her stepfather, she was pondering the mystery of her real father, a diplomat who disappeared when she was three and remained a spectral absence in her life for another 25 years until he dropped down dead and she was summoned to identify his body — which, of course, she couldn’t.

As Allende confesses in her latest book, My Invented Country: “With a family like mine, you don’t need imagination.”

We are due to meet at her husband’s law practice in Sausalito, an effete “artistic” resort across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. I am greeted at the desk by Giulia, who doubles as Allende’s assistant, being also her daughter-in-law, sort of. Giulia is the second wife of Ernesto, widower of Paula, the daughter who died of porphyria 11 years ago at the age of 28. “After Paula died, she left me a son,” Allende explains. “And I love Giulia because she brings happiness and light.”

Anyway, Giulia forgot to check that the firm’s library was free; it isn’t, so we set off to do the interview at Allende’s home. As she drives, our photographers following us, she explains the family set-up. Ernesto and Giulia live in her old house, a little down the hill from her present one. In another house down there, her son Nicolas lives with his new wife. His first wife, she explains, fell in love with another man and left Nicolas holding three babies. Nicolas is shy and wasn’t going to do anything about this himself, so Allende made inquiries among her old friends in Venezuela, where she lived for many years, and found someone she thought would make him a good wife. To test her character, Allende had the prospective bride accompany her on a trip down the Amazon. She passed, her nerve faltering only when they witnessed a street shooting in Rio. Now she and Nicolas are married. They are so close that they even look like each other.

Wow, I say, there has to be a novel in all that. Allende agrees, but unfortunately she is forbidden to write it. Her children have made her sign a contract prohibiting her from using their lives in her books.

They made her sign a contract? “Yes, because they feel exposed. But things happen in my family that are incredible . . .”

When we arrive, her home turns out to be named House of the Spirits, after her first, most famous, novel. A few seconds later the photographers pull in behind us. “Oh,” she says, “I completely forgot that they were meant to be following.”

She is dressed today, as usual, in silk. She is 61, tiny, with big auburn hair, improbably smooth pale skin and a musical Spanish accent that makes it quite a surprise when, say, she suddenly calls Arnold Schwarzenegger “an asshole”.

She gives us a tour of her light-filled house overlooking the bay. In front of a bookcase lined with her books — ten in all, four of them, if you count House of the Spirits, memoirs (the extent of Allende’s ego is not in doubt) — is her grandmother’s massive and, you would have thought, immovable, séance table. On the other side of the swimming pool is where she writes, and off it a prayer room full of cushions and candles and a pot containing Paula’s ashes, photographs and letters.

For Buddhist prayer? “Or Christian. Except I hate Christianity — all that guilt!” The invented country of her new book is Chile, fiercely Catholic, no-divorce, no-abortion, a patriarchy that fancies itself to be matriarchal. She left it almost 30 years ago, chased out by the consequences of the right-wing coup that killed her second cousin, Salvador Allende. She was inspired to write about Chile again when a grandson predicted — three years ago — that she had three more years to live. Should she, she wondered, spend this generous allocation in Chile or in California? By the end of the book, she concluded that she would be equally un-at home in either place.

In California, she explains as she sips green tea in the shade on the veranda, she looks unusual because she wears silk rather than sneakers; but her veils and plumes would not fit Santiago’s sober regime of black dresses and spare make-up either. She lacks Chile’s modesty, its pessimism and its puritanism. Above all, when it comes to keeping secrets, the Chilean national hobby, she is hopelessly incontinent. When did she shed all these Chilean values?

“When I was 15. I realised all of a sudden — it was like an epiphany — that while I was fighting desperately against the male authority of my grandfather, my stepfather, my uncles, the Government, the Establishment, the secular culture and male chauvinism, I had overlooked the Church, which is the most patriarchal of all institutions. I realised that I could not possibly belong to an organisation that was totally against everything I believed. And then I kept on fighting.