An explosive novel... Every character is enthralling... This is a boldly plotted, sharply funny, and purposefully bone-shaking novel of sexual violence, political terror, "collective shame," and dark family secrets, all transcended by courage and love. -- Booklist (starred review)

I found this quote quite fitting for not only her latest novel -- her first set in the present -- but also for herself and her tumultuous life. 

Allende, small and beautiful, bold and funny, is no stranger to dark family demons or political terror.  The fiery Chilean-American literary powerhouse has used her life's traumas -- which include being politically exiled from Chile when her cousin was overthrown by Pinochet, the devastating death of her daughter from a rare disease and the drug related deaths of two of her step-children -- to better the world through her writing, her speaking and through her foundation and nonprofit work.

Allende is a prolific and wildly popular author with 19 books translated into 35 languages and more than 57 million copies sold.  She also holds 12 international honorary doctorates and has won 50 awards in more than 15 countries. She lectures all over the world on women's issues and also started a foundation to empower women and girls, which she created to pay homage to her daughter, Paula Frias, who died in 1992 at 28 years old. 

Her latest novel out today, Maya's Notebook, is the gripping story of 16-year-old Maya Vidal, told through her notebook. Maya was lovingly raised in Berkeley by her Chilean grandmother and her African-American grandfather. But when cancer took Maya's beloved grandfather, she started into a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol.  After being sent to a school for troubled kids in a remote part of the Northwest, she escapes and ends up with a violent twist in Las Vegas. Before long, her drug dealer, the FBI, and a corrupt Vegas cop are after her.  On the run, Maya eventually ends up in a a remote Chilean island where she is sheltered and changed by the people of the island of Chiloe. Read more about Maya's Notebook on Allende's website.

The very busy Allende was nice enough to answer a few of my questions about her latest book.

What was your inspiration for writing this story?

My inspiration to write this story was my grandchildren and their friends, all teenagers when I was writing the book.  I saw that they were exposed to many dangers and the parents could not really protect them: drugs, alcohol, crime, violence, unsafe sex, porn, etc. Fortunately they all survived those very vulnerable years and now they are in college. 

This book includes some very complex, sometimes violent characters.  What was your research process like for researching/writing these kind of characters?

I did not have to research much for this book.  My three stepchildren are addicts; two of them have died of drug related causes.  I have seen how devastating addiction can be in young people's lives and the lives of everybody around them. I only researched about the new drugs in the street, they change all the time.

What do you hope is something that readers remember about the book long after they have read it?

I wish my readers will remember the characters.  When I write fiction I never try to deliver a message, I just want to tell a story.  But I admit that I want the story to be memorable and the characters to touch the reader's heart. 

We can add another example of misogyny to this list, t-shirt company Solid Gold Bomb, which blamed a computer error for the creation and sale of shirts with slogans like "KEEP CALM AND RAPE A LOT" and "KEEP CALM AND HIT HER."

Though Amazon swiftly removed these shirts from sale on their site and the t-shirts' manufacturer as asserted in his apology that "As a father, husband, brother and son, I would never promote such product in our company," it's clear that we still have a long way to go before violence against women is eradicated.  For every triumph, like the hard-fought renewal of the Violence Against Women Act after 500 days languishing in Congress, we're faced with reports that mandatory federal spending cuts will erode many programs intended to help victims of abuse.

Here are some shocking statistics about the prevalence of domestic violence:

• According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 1 in 4 U.S. women will experience intimate partner violence.


• Approximately 4.8 million intimate partner rapes and physical assaults are perpetrated against U.S. women annually (Findings from the 2000 National Violence Against Women Survey, National Institute of Justice & Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)


• According to the U.S. Surgeon General, domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to American women.


• On average more than three women a day are murdered by their current or former intimate partners.


• Young women ages 16-24 have a higher incidence of partner violence than any other age group, almost triple that of the national average.

Clearly, this issue remains a huge problem for our society across a wide range of demographics. But one thing remains consistent, according to Camille Hayes, a writer and Sacramento-based domestic violence advocate: in the large majority of cases, the batterer is male, which makes domestic violence "a men's issue, not just a women's issue," says Hayes.

"The domestic violence movement was born out of Second Wave feminism in the 1970s," she says." so from the beginning, we've defined domestic violence as a women's issue, and I think that's left us with a gap, or blind spot, in our conceptualization of the problem. The information we have to date is very victim-centered: we know a lot about victim needs, how best to protect them, what the warning signs of abuse are."

"But that's leaving out the other major actor in these relationships -- the batterer. We don't know nearly enough about them, about their motives and needs. How can we hope to change batterer behavior if we don't fully understand it?"

"If you look at battery statistics across all groups -- gay, straight, men, women -- it's uniformly the case that men are much more likely to be the aggressors... So even when the sex of the victim changes, the sex of the likely perpetrator is still male. But although it's very apparent that men play a defining role here, we haven't managed to gather much useful information on them. I think that has to change if we ever want to get these incidence rates down."

Christine Bronstein: What are the limits of policy reform?

Camille Hayes: For the last 30-plus years, since the domestic violence movement grew into a distinct professional field, we've been addressing this problem at the societal level mostly via public policy reform. And there are lots of good DV laws on the books at the state and federal levels, and of course a network of crisis intervention agencies across the country that help individuals. But still, a quarter of American women will be abused in their lifetimes--I think we can all agree that's too many. It appears that we're beginning to bump up against the limits of what we can accomplish through legislative reform and the criminal justice solution.  We need to continue to support those methods of violence control, while also adding new strategies.

What is the role of individual psychology in the fight against domestic violence?

The analysis of domestic violence that drives most of our policy and intervention, and which is the basis of our understanding of abuse dynamics, was inherited from the feminist movement. What that means in practical terms is that our analysis of violent relationships is a high-level, socio-political analysis. It's focused on large-scale systems change and figuring out how big cultural institutions, like the criminal justice or education systems, impact us. Now, that kind of analysis is great, and it's taken us really far toward reforming large institutions and censuring them for systemic sexism. But when you're working on a problem like domestic violence, you start to see the limits of the socio-political analysis pretty quickly -- namely, it doesn't have much to say about individual psychology. Batterer behavior is so pathological that I don't think we'll ever know why partner violence is so common, or be able to reverse that trend, until we put real effort into understanding the psychology of abusers.

How many men are batterers?   Are most batterers repeat offenders?

Many are. Given that the vast majority of men aren't violent, to get such a high victimization rate among women, and among gay men, you have to have these chronic abusers who are battering multiple partners in their lifetimes.

How likely are batterers to repeat?

The numbers I've seen vary, but anywhere from 40-62 percent of batterers will re-offend.

Are there any programs out there for batterers?  

Yes, there are certified Batterer Intervention Programs (BIPs) in every county in CA, and I think that's true of most states. In California they're overseen by Probation Departments, meaning they have the authority to certify and de-certify official BIPs. Probation offices are county-level authorities, so that means all 58 counties in California manage their batterers programs differently. The types of programs they certify and the criteria they use aren't specified in statute. Some of those programs collect outcome data, others don't, but even the ones that do aren't all collecting the same kinds of data. The state of our knowledge about batterers programs is kind of a mess.

Which types of batterers programs seem to be most successful?

Even for the programs that are deemed "successful," because people aren't collecting consistent data, we're not in a good position to tease out which aspects of the programs are the efficacious ones, and which aspects aren't necessary for success. Now, how these programs measure success also varies. Sometimes it's by checking to see if they have re-offended after a certain amount of time, sometimes they use before-and-after surveys to test movement on attitudes about things like sexism and conflict resolution. So even the way we define a successful batterer intervention is all over the place -- there's just a lot we don't know.

What are some possible solutions... is it through the private sector nonprofits, policy or government programs or a combination?

I think what we need at this stage is for large governmental organizations like the National Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Justice to get involved, to help oversee and systematize data collection in existing programs, and fund outcome research on promising new interventions. One of the challenging things about working with batterers is that the ones we know about generally are somewhere in the criminal justice system: in prison, on probation, seeking mandated counseling. Psychologists can't just walk up to a prison and say "I'd like to do some research on your domestic violence offenders." Access can be tricky, so I think we really need some government involvement to get the ball rolling.

If you want to learn more about programs that work with batterers, check out ManKind, one of the nation's first batterer education programs for men who are violent with their female partners. Established in 1980, the two goals of ManKind are to help men end their immediate violence toward and abuse of their partners, and to engage men in community advocacy to change the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that support men's violence against women and girls. Learn more here.

He must have forgotten that my husband, Phil Bronstein, is no longer in the daily newspaper business. Nonetheless, Governor Brown has a very good point. 

A San Francisco Chronicle story explained the importance of Brown's Proposition 30:

"The proposition is by far the biggest decision on the state ballot, one that will shadow or brighten the state's future for years... Without these increases, so-called trigger cuts will hit, slashing schools and other critical programs. To make his case, Brown has said he won't sign any morning-after measures to paper over the $6 billion gap that will materialize should Prop. 30 fail. These looming cuts are for real."

Why don't we know that out-of-state PACs are trying to trick us out of funding our own school system?  Brown said a court battle over efforts to reveal who is behind the murky donation had been waging all weekend but news outlets weren't paying attention.

If Californians were better informed about Propositions 30 and 38, we would know that you can (and should) in fact vote yes on both (which I didn't know until I attended an Educate Our State fundraiser two weeks ago) and that splitting the vote between the two propositions is the best way to ensure they both fail.

I asked Crystal Brown, the founder of Educate Our State -- a parent-led grass roots education advocacy group with over 45,000 members -- to boil it down for me.

Can people vote yes on both?

Yes they can -- and (the propositions) can only go into effect if one gets over 50 percent of the vote.  Here is a short one minute video describing this: http://youtu.be/eCgUlM1ZM6Y

What happens of they both pass?

If both pass, the one with the most votes will go into effect.  The one with less votes will likely go to court to see if there are pieces and parts that could possibly be put into place.  But that depends on the court and also what the Governor and Molly Munger, the force behind Proposition 38, decide to do.  No one will be taxed twice.

What will be the most egregious effects on CA schools if 30 and 38 do not pass?

The biggest effects on California schools are the impacts of the trigger cuts.  School districts are already operating in most cases as if these cuts will not happen.  If the trigger cuts go into effect, many school districts will be forced to borrow more money than they have already (because of prior year deferrals) just to stay solvent.  If they cannot borrow the money (at a high interest rate) -- and most can't -- they will be forced to shorten the school year, cut programs like transportation, reading specialists, art, music, PE, etc.  This will result in loss of wages for teachers and loss of critical programming for students.  

This doesn't even begin to speak to future years.  There will likely be more massive teacher lay-offs as of March.  Last year we laid off 15,000 teachers in California.  Over the past four years we have laid off about 40,000 and class size is rising above 40-60.  

We have cut over $20 billion from education already. 

Positive effects if 30 passes?

If 30 passes, schools will retain and preserve current year funding and not face devastating decisions this year.  This will not add any new revenue to schools for the coming year, but there will not be mid-year cuts or districts forced into insolvency. 

The Governor described 30 as boiling down to taxing the top one percent to pay for our schools, but the rhetoric around it makes it more complicated. How would you describe 30?

Prop 30 is a combination of an income tax to those earning more than $250,000 per year (which I do not believe is just the top one percent but it is close) and a sales tax which will impact all Californians.  Between these two revenue sources, about $7 billion would be generated to make up the gap in the expenses and revenue of the current budget.

How would you describe 38?

It is an across-the-board income tax -- generating almost 12 billion per year for k-12 and early education.  However, it would not eliminate the need for the trigger cuts as written.  We don't exactly know what the governor would do if it passed and 30 doesn't.  

What could be the long-term effects on our society if both fail?

The long-term effects would be devastating.  We are already underfunding so many critical programs in California, and education has taken by far the largest hit over the past five years.  California has a 25 percent drop-out rate, some of lowest test scores in the country, and a very diverse population to educate. All of this while we are one of the largest economies in the world and educate more children than any other state.  In fact, the next most populous state for public school kids is Texas and they educate two million less than we do!

Some facts from the Educate Our State website, that might make us all want to invest in the education of our state's children.

http://www.educateourstate.org/

• California is the ninth largest economy in the world, and we educate one in eight children in the United States, or 6.2 million children (1,500,000 more than Texas, the second largest)


• California currently ranks last in teacher to student ratio


• California currently ranks last in librarian to student ratio


• California ranks last in guidance counselor to student ratio


• California ranks 47Th for district/administration to student ratio


• Only 75 percent of California students graduate from high school in four years.


• Dropouts from the class of 2008 will cost California almost $42.1 billion in lost taxable wages over their lifetime

Who are the biggest losers if both initiatives fail?

My kids, your kids, your neighbor's kids, the college kids who can't get their classes or afford the tuition increases -- in essence, the future workforce of California and the future economic stability of our state. Consider the long-term consequences of the loss of an additional three full weeks of instruction (after having already lost up to five days in recent years), ballooning class sizes, the shutting of school libraries, the elimination of physical education, the termination of reading specialists, and/or ongoing technological stagnation, among other possible budget remedies. 

Can you tell me your mission for Educate Our State?

Educate Our State is a grassroots, parent-led, statewide campaign uniting the voices of Californians in support of high-quality, K-12 public education and to demand real, systemic change. We believe parents, together with community leaders, can organize, mobilize and put pressure on all stakeholders to work together and agree on fundamental changes that put our children's achievement and success first.  We are a 100 percent parent-led and directed effort. 

What do you recommend people do on Tuesday?

Vote Yes on 30 and 38! Easy. 

"What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex -- what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex." -- Rush Limbaugh

In response to an environment where Republican legislators in 49 states introduced 916 bills targeting women's reproductive rights, radio talk-show hosts like Limbaugh refer to college students speaking before Congress as "sluts," and anti-choice activists convinced the Susan G. Komen Foundation to defund reproductive services provider Planned Parenthood, one group is taking up arms in the War on Women in an effort to get every American woman to vote with both bravado and a sense of humor.

"If every women was aware of the literally thousands of bills targeting women's rights, I predict this election would be a landslide Obama victory," Rock The Slut Vote spokesperson Kimberley A. Johnson told me.  "Those who claim this War On Women is merely a liberal distraction will soon realize how serious and destructive the GOP plan is to both genders. It's our goal to make sure that never happens."

Some of the more egregious pieces of legislation Kimberley cites are:

• In Wisconsin, Republican Senator Glenn Grothman introduced a bill criminalizing single mothers, calling their marital status a contributing factor in child abuse and neglect.




• In Arizona, doctors have the legal right to withhold medical information from pregnant patients who may be facing life-threatening issues in order to prevent them from having abortions.




• Senate Republicans blocked the Equal Pay bill, thus denying a woman the right to sue an employer if she finds a male counterpart is being paid more for the same job.

"As you can see, we are being hit from all directions and this campaign against women is not just about the right to choose." Kimberley explained.

Founded in March 2012, by 56-year-old mother of two Susan McMillan Emry, Rock The Slut Vote's stated purpose is "to fight the GOP effort to bully, subjugate and silence women. We will wrest the power from the word slut and help women get informed, get involved, get registered and vote."

"Women and men need to be informed," Johnson told me.

"This is one of the most important elections in recent history and we all must understand what's at stake. Only looking at and voting on the headlines doesn't provide the full picture of what's going on and can prove detrimental in the voting booth."

Johnson, also an anthologist and an actress who appeared on Days of Our Lives, joined the Rock The Slut Vote effort in April of this year. Together, Johnson and Emry have received national attention and a following that grows daily. They've also released a book, Rock The Slut Vote: American Edition: Navigating The Republican War On Women. 100 percent of the profits are donated to Planned Parenthood.

RTSV also has an online store, where supporters can purchase t-shirts, tote bags, and bumper stickers to support the cause.

"The favorite slogan chosen for t-shirts and bumper stickers is 'Rush Limbaugh Thinks I'm A Slut," Johnson said.

KJ: We are uncomfortable with the word slut, but we are more uncomfortable with all of the legislation being introduced by Republicans that denies access to birth control, fair pay and the right to choose. We realize the term is ugly, but much like our Founding Fathers embraced the derogatory term Yankee, we choose to embrace and seize the word slut and refuse to allow a small group of people to take away our power. In other words, if Fluke is a slut for wanting affordable birth control on her insurance plan, then we are sluts too. We don't expect that every woman will take on the name and that's okay. We choose to fight this very real War On Women and have garnered enormous support from people in more than 25 countries all over the globe. We're proud to have men and women from all walks of life support our cause. Most recently, MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry was seen at the Democratic National Convention wearing a pin that read: Sluts Vote.

KJ:  To get women registered and to the voting booths. Our site www.waronwomen.com has a tab that makes registering easy. We are galvanizing and informing both genders and our message is to get out and vote! While 10 million more women than men voted in 2008, another 20 million women did not vote in that election. Those numbers are dramatic and important.

KJ: Romney is on record saying he will defund Planned Parenthood. The Republican platform states very clearly they are against abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Ryan has a record of working on legislation that takes power away from women and the two of them would reverse decades of progress. Once elected, there's no telling how fast they will work to dismantle the laws already in place, but we believe it's a safe bet they will act swiftly.

If you're interested in getting involved with Rock The Slut Vote, you have a number of options.  When I spoke with Johnson, she said about twelve thousand people are reading the articles outlining the GOP agenda and blog posts directing people to volunteer for the Democratic Party on RTSV's Facebook page.

The RTSV website also "provides various resources to get informed and involved, including tabs that get you registered to vote, Truth vs. Propaganda and a Sound Off tab that makes it easy to contact local officials and have your voice heard on the specific issues that concern you," Johnson says.

But the most important thing you can do to Rock the Slut Vote is, of course, to vote.  "I often hear people complain their vote is meaningless. To that I say, vote anyway!" Johnson said. 

"If you owned a business and a top-ranking employee was damaging the company, would
you throw your hands in the air and say, 'Oh well, there's nothing I can do, so I'll keep paying them.' Or would you fire them? The answer is clear. We are the government's employer. It is our civic duty to partake in the democracy on which this country was founded. Freedom isn't free and it's up to each and every citizen to exercise the right, the privilege and the duty to vote."

• National Step Family Resource Center

• The Blended Family Survival Guide on Getting Married with Children

I had the great and terrifying honor of introducing Gloria Steinem at an intimate benefit for Ms. in San Francisco last week. I was up late the night before struggling with these questions:

How do I properly give homage to someone who provided my generation the luxury of largely ignoring the movement -- to which she has dedicated her life -- that enabled us to charge into the colleges of our choice, wearing what we wanted and having abortions without hassle? How do you thank Gloria and honor the effects of her work, which gave us such equal footing, that we were allowed the audacity to scoff at the feminist movement that got us into the co-ed dorm rooms where we sat rolling our eyes.

And then I hit my mid 30s. Looking out from this new perspective, with a baby and a step-son and an MBA, I realized, like many of my generation, that once you get past your first several years after college or grad school (where the playing field is fairly level -- thank you, Gloria) the percentages of women in places of power are far from equal.

I learned that over my lifetime I will earn $2 million less than my male counterparts. And that even though women control over 80 percent of the spending, our voices are largely missing from top corporate and national discussions.

So, for the last several years I have been trying to make up for my youthful, naïve scorn and Gloria Steinem has become my hero.

It was very hard to find words to honor someone I feel I owe so much.

Although the group was small, much smaller than others I've spoke in front of, my hands were shaking the iPad I was using as a crutch. I tried to focus on the friendly faces of my co-hosts, women who have themselves shattered many a glass ceiling -- women like Gina Pell, Julie Chaiken, Sophia Yen and Gina Bianchini.

Here is what I ended up reading from my wavering iPad:

All week I have been helping my husband, Phil Bronstein, work on a presentation about the disintegration of traditional journalism... it starts out: Traditional journalism is dying, but what is surprising about that is how fast it is happening.

I have been married to a journalist for the last eight years and I know all too well the trials and tribulations facing the media industry today.

In a world where 85 percent of public opinion and news is created by men, often white and affluent men much like my husband, women are being left out of the national discourse and with the cuts and massive shifts in media companies that statistic will likely move in the wrong direction.

So, it is vital that organizations like Ms., an iconic institution of great accountability in journalism -- both for and by women -- not only maintain itself, but thrive. This is how we reassert ourselves into this important national conversation.

Women control over 80 percent of consumer spending and for the first time ever in 2009 women earned more Ph.D.s than men, but in the world of journalism we have a good fight ahead of us.

Rutgers University study found that 97 percent of op-eds by scholars in the Wall Street Journal are written by men.

What is the cost to society when half of the nation's best minds and best ideas -- women's minds and women's ideas -- are left out?

This is why Gloria Steinem and Kathy Spillar, the editor of Ms. and executive vice president of The Feminist Majority foundation are so fundamentally important to us. They have changed how all of us here today think and feel about ourselves. And they are on the right track of using a non-profit journalism model to assure women have a trusted voice now and in the future. 

Every issue of Ms. is relevant.

I even named my company, A Band of Wives, after an article I love that was in the first ever issue of Ms. -- "Why I Want a Wife" by Judy Syfers, that came out before I was born.

That is the power Ms. has to inspire generations. I hope my daughter grows up in a world with Ms. as a watchdog for women's issues and an invaluable tool to keep the movement going.

I watched the HBO documentary on Gloria for the third time last night and am constantly awed by her calm, her humor, her honesty and her integrity. You can tell from her incredibly long list of accomplishments that she loves women. She believes in women.

At the end of the documentary she says, "The advice I'd give to young women is not to listen to my advice, but to listen to yourselves. Knowing yourself is more important than knowing me."  Which is just another example of how much she trusts and values women.

But Gloria, that is one piece of advice I am bucking because watching how you lived your life inspires me to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.  Your words and actions inspire all of us to want to find ways to lift the barriers that still hold us back.

I'm so excited to introduce Gloria Steinem.

Psychiatric medications are among the most widely prescribed and biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S. In 2010, Americans spent $16.1 billion on antipsychotics to treat depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, $11.6 billion on antidepressants and $7.2 billion on treatment for ADHD, according to IMS Health, which tracks prescription-drug sales.

Cold, hard scientific evidence in reputable medical journals clearly proves that to be truly healthy both mentally and physically, it's not enough to eat right, exercise, sleep eight hours a night, see your doctor for regular check-ups and take your medicine. This is why my Marin County integrative medicine practice was full of well-intentioned health nuts who were still depressed, anxious and sick.

At least 75 percent and in some studies, up to 100 percent, of the effect of anti-depressants has been proven to be attributable to the placebo effect -- which I believe is good news. This means that the potent cocktail of hope, positive belief, the support of a medical practitioner who cares and the physiological self-healing mechanisms that get triggered by the body when it wants to heal, are ever-powerful. Some studies even suggest that placebos work when the patient knows it's a sugar pill.

So why do we need the pill? Sure, every doctor will report some case studies where it's truly a biochemical process, and once the biochemical disorder is reversed pharmaceutically, everything else falls into place. But I'd argue that most of the time, even if there is a biochemical component, it's not purely biochemical.

"The deal hinged on the long-term relationship between the founder, a serial entrepreneur, and a venture capitalist who has become a leading figure in e-commerce startups... In other words, it's the kind of thing that happens every day in Silicon Valley -- except for one crucial detail: They're both women. And that makes the story of Joyus founder Sukhinder Singh Cassidy and Accel Partners' Theresia Gouw Ranzetta worth highlighting."

"But what's different now is that there is an exciting new crop of e-commerce companies building real revenue and real community, really fast, by purposefully harnessing the power of female consumers. One Kings Lane, Plum District, Stella & Dot, Rent the Runway, Modcloth, BirchBox, Shoedazzle, Zazzle, Callaway Digital Arts, and Shopkick are just a few examples of companies leveraging 'girl power.' The majority of these companies were also founded by women, which is also an exciting trend."