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But it was not easy. I was born to a very conservative Catholic family. I got a lot of aggression and always the feeling that I was a little crazy; actually, very crazy. I would get over it. As soon as I had children I would get better. That was the message.”

At 20 she married her first boyfriend, Miguel, an engineering student. Soon she was a mother. But she did not get over her antiepiphany. She was determined that her daughter would not grow up put upon as she and her mother had been. Yet although she was a minor star of women’s journalism and Chilean television, at home she played the role of a traditional wife. Miguel was a nice man, but she was his geisha. Inside, she felt not so much selfhatred as confusion.

“I dressed like a hippy, I looked like a hippy, but I was not a hippy. I painted my car with flowers, trying to show the world I was someone quite different, but I was the perfect daughter and granddaughter. I would visit my grandfather every day and buy the groceries for my mother-in-law.”

In 1973 Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende, the elected President. I imagine that she must have gained self-esteem and courage from her work for the new opposition, hiding dissidents in her home and arranging their asylum. She says, on the contrary, that she was sick with fear the whole time.

“I was asked in Chile recently how I would write an ending for General Pinochet. I said it would be to have him get very, very old, to live to be 100, surrounded by the ghosts of the people he betrayed, the people he tortured and killed and by the children of those people until the very last day of his very long life.”

It would be fitting torture, I say — assuming he has some sort of conscience.

“If he had some sort of conscience he wouldn’t need the ghosts,” she says.

In 1974 the family fled to Venezuela. Her husband was forced to take work at a faraway dam project. With no connections and no career, robbed of the semi-celebrity status she had in Chile, she began to have affairs. For three months in 1978 she left her family for an Argentine flautist (“We ended up playing the flute in his bed,” she writes in a memoir, promising that this is not a metaphor). But she realised that she had “screwed up” and returned to Miguel for another nine, not very happy, years. Soon, however, she began writing. A long letter to her dying grandfather, embellishing family lore, became The House of the Spirits. It was an international bestseller.

“There was a need in the world at that point for what I wrote and that was why it worked. I am trying to enjoy the moment.”

It has been a long moment.

“It has been 22 years. I have been very, very lucky, but that does not mean I will continue to be lucky.”

Although most of her subsequent novels were not fantastic, she remains identified with South American magic realism, that great literary pash of the Eighties. Being a more literal-minded journalist than she ever was, I want to know if she really believes in the magic.