A former brothel on an eerily still backstreet of Sausalito seems an appropriate place to meet one of Latin America’s foremost magical realists. Outside, the azaleas and camellias are starting to flower, and the absolute clarity of the northern Californian light gives an extra sharpness to the building’s renovated cedar shingles. It feels like you’ve stepped into an Edward Hopper painting.

The ethereal calm is matched perfectly by the poised stillness of the receptionist at Isabel Allende’s office. I know who she is. In fact, I’ve just read about her. She is Juliette, the one who married for love and ran away to Greece, bringing up her two sons while running an idyllic cliff-top restaurant. Then she was widowed, returned to California and offered up her womb as a surrogate mother – not once but twice, though the second attempt ended in failure and a childless Lori had to accept that the three stepchildren already in her life were enough. But that’s another story.

Since I’m not sure how you’re meant to address a character from a book I decide not to let on that I know who she is.

All this has left me bracing myself for an encounter with an otherworldly fabulist when a small dynamo of a woman darts into the reception area. I don’t even have a chance to size up Isabel Allende – all five feet of her, jacked up a few more inches by elongated heels – before she has hustled me back out of her office, across the street and to a small table at a Japanese restaurant opposite. (It seems fitting that Sushi Ran, one of California’s best raw-fish establishments, also sits on this nondescript street in the former dockyard city by the Bay, the sort of unlikely coincidence you’d find in an Allende novel.)

The soft-focus publicity shots and the romantic novels don’t prepare you for Allende’s considerable presence. Sitting opposite me is an energetic woman with her hair pulled back tight. She has the tidy and prosperous look of the Chilean bourgeoisie to which she used to belong, before fleeing into exile more than 30 years ago (Salvador Allende, the Marxist president whose violent overthrow ushered in the long years of the Pinochet repression, was a cousin.) She looks much younger than her 65 years. That might in part be the result of the face-lift that she admits to in her latest book, but it’s much more a result of the abundant energy and restlessness she radiates.

Allende is all business. She steers me through the menu and the conversation shifts quickly to her feelings about the US, her adopted home of the past two decades. What comes out is a surprisingly strident mix of ingrained left-leaning politics and a foreigner’s distaste for the less palatable aspects of American popular culture, though this is leavened by a strong appreciation of the relative political and social openness of her adopted home.

“I dislike the vulgarity, the ignorance, the arrogance about the ignorance. How dumb people are and how they are about being dumb,” she declares. The prevalence of violence in US popular culture causes particular distress, particularly now she has grandchildren to worry about. “People want to experience violence vicariously – they want to see violence, more and more gore, more gruesome all the time.”

Other barbs are reserved for local social conventions that seem constricting. “I hate political correctness. For a writer, it’s very limiting. You can’t say what you want to say.” What really gets her going, though, is politics. The idealistic young feminist, who rebelled against the constrictions of an upper-middle-class Chilean upbringing still seems close to the surface.

“Most Americans have no idea how dangerous the CIA is abroad, and the things they’ve done in the name of the cold war, the Muslims or whatever,” she says. The CIA’s efforts to undermine the Allende government still warrant denunciation. And the more strident she becomes about current US politics, the more her command of English threatens to slip.

“I don’t like McCain – I don’t like McCain at all. He’s a … war person,” she says, groping for the right words. Following the logic of her own rhetoric, Allende even says she’s thought of quitting the country if another Republican government is elected, before hauling herself back in. As a former refugee who is now married to an American and has an extended family here, she concedes that the time for moving is over.

As the food arrives, I try to find a way to change tack. The Isabel Allende now picking at eel on wooden skewers across the narrow table is an appealing firebrand, but not the person I came to find.

What I’d hoped to discover was the woman whose latest book, The Sum of Our Days, I have just finished. An account of the 16 years since the devastating death of her daughter Paula, it reads almost like a magical realist’s dream of life in the San Francisco Bay area. It is a place ripe with pharmacological and spiritual adventures, where “miracles” seem to happen at every turn and an extended family that she calls her “clan” and her “tribe” hang together through improbable events.

In the book, it doesn’t seem surprising when Allende engineers the adoption of her stepdaughter’s child by a pair of lesbian Buddhist nuns. Nor does she seem to bat an eye when a once hyper-conservative Venezuelan daughter-in-law confides that she is about to leave Allende’s son and grandchildren and settle down instead with the girlfriend of one of the author’s stepsons (for maximum effect, that little bombshell was dropped at a Thanksgiving family gathering.) Allende also plays a part in bringing Juliette the receptionist into the extended family as a would-be surrogate mother for another daughter-in-law – who, of course, she also personally selected as her son’s mate, even going as far as to take her on a trip to the Amazon to test her mettle first.

This is a subject she warms to at once, switching roles easily. “I am the matriarch,” she declares. She describes the extended family she has built around her in California as a throwback to her cultural roots, to the time when family members depended entirely on the clan for support. Blended with the progressive social mores and political currents of modern California, it has produced a rich combination.

“This is an incredibly tolerant place,” she says. “I love this place because it’s very diverse. It has all the influence of the Pacific, all the Asians, and it’s Hispanic like nowhere else in the country. And it’s very avant-garde – everything new starts here.”

It is also a place for spiritual experimentation. “We have the time and the inclination just to search for alternative ways of spirituality,” she says, before allowing herself a self-mocking laugh as she describes her own “search for different spiritual practice, which is like designer religion, you know. You can choose.”

The personal spiritual brew she’s come up with comprises her “prayer group”, a collection of women who gather to offer support and meditate together, and a personal spiritual guide – “not a guru”.

The plates have been cleared with amazing speed and I’m being offered a dessert menu. I don’t want to eat more but there’s no choice: the restaurant is filling up and ordering a green tea ice cream is the only way to string things out. It turns out to be a good decision, because the ice cream is luscious and Allende starts to give a glimpse of what really makes her tick, at least as an author.

“My life is full of ups and downs, full of people and stories, you know?” she says. “I don’t want a happy life. I want an interesting life, something I can write about. I think I’m a natural storyteller. I see the world in terms of stories.”

The all-important thing, she says, is to keep “the tension, the rhythm, the tone, the colours of the story. When my husband and I and our family are together and I hear them tell me a story, an anecdote of the family, I cringe because they’re missing the point. They miss it. I mean, they just ruin the story. It’s a joke badly told.”

In her own memoir the story, the particular joke, is always finely turned. “Other people say, it didn’t really happen that way,” she says. “It wasn’t exactly in that place. And I say, who cares? Who cares where it was? What is important is the symbolism or the beauty or whatever. But people don’t get it.”

So does that mean the magical stories of her Californian clan should be taken with a pinch of salt?

A former journalist, Allende does not duck the issue. “You choose what to tell, what to omit, what to enhance,” she says. She, at least, has an ample record to draw on: the letters she has written for years to her mother in Chile describing events in her life in close detail.

I remind her of a conversation she described in another book, of a meeting with the poet Pablo Neruda in which she offered to write his life story. His reaction: she was the last person he’d trust to tell it truthfully. She laughs. “He was right. I’m a terrible journalist. And I like to write fiction because I’m allowed to lie. To lie is a virtue if you are a fiction writer.” A good story, though, can glide easily across the line between truth and fiction.

As we get ready to leave, I ask her about her latest project, begun earlier this year. It is a novel about slavery – something that she predicts will attract considerable controversy when it is published.

“It’s very difficult because I’m not black,” she says. “So I’m not allowed morally – it’s not politically correct – to write about something that supposedly is not in my heritage. But I think that’s a limitation. I have written about all kinds of people, all kinds of places and all kinds of circumstances and times.” She is already gearing herself up for the fight. Her future adversaries don’t know what’s in store for them.

Across the road again I linger for a moment to talk to Juliette, who is describing her efforts to get one of her sons into a preferred local school. I’ve read about him, they feel like family. But Allende is impatient to get on. After a polite but abrupt dismissal I am soon back on the street.

Richard Waters is the FT’s San Francisco bureau chief

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Sushi Ran, Caledonia Street, Sausalito
1 x freshwater eel
1 x tamago
1 x sushi lunch
1 x spinach salad
1 x miso soup
1 x green tea ice cream
Total $62