Shared Lives

The Garden of Fabiola

Shared Lives: The Garden of Fabiola is for readers who value quiet, reflective memoirs rooted in family, land, and memory. It will resonate with those drawn to intergenerational stories, rural life, Chilean culture, and women whose strength is expressed through care and continuity. Ideal for readers navigating midlife, reinvention, or belonging, this book speaks to anyone who believes the most meaningful lives are built patiently—and shared generously.

Shared Lives: The Garden of Fabiola is an English-language literary memoir rooted in southern Chile—where a life is measured less by turning points than by the steady work of love: keeping a fire alive, walking a long road to school, opening a door to whoever arrives, and learning (again and again) what it means to belong.

The book opens in Quillón, in the rural household of María Modesta, where five children grow up inside a strict, tender rhythm: dawn chores, hours-long walks to school in Liucura Alto, the discipline of Monday assemblies, and the eternal flame of a wood stove banked at night and rekindled at dawn—an everyday ritual that becomes the story’s first, lasting symbol of continuity.

From there, memory widens—into courtship, marriage, and the slow construction of a shared life with Bernardo, a sailor whose long absences test and strengthen the family’s bonds. In these chapters, “home” is not an idea; it is a practice: food prepared without fuss, work divided without ceremony, and a household that learns how to receive others without losing itself.

At the heart of the memoir is Santa Juana—not merely as a destination, but as a place earned over time. The garden becomes a second language for devotion: cultivated beauty, patience made visible, and a way of holding memory in living form. The narrative returns often to thresholds—kitchen doors, garden paths, family introductions—because this is a book about how belonging happens: gradually, through repetition, through care.

The people in these pages are drawn with affection and moral clarity. There is Julia Rosa, remembered as an exceptional mother-in-law—constant, joyful, and fiercely supportive. There are friendships that mature over decades. There are moments of laughter and testing, and the quiet dignity of ordinary competence that, in a family, counts as its own kind of proof.

And the memoir’s scope expands beyond the private sphere into culture and livelihood: Bernardo’s reinvention after naval life leads to Punta y Taco, a store devoted to Chilean tradition—huaso attire, handcrafted accessories, and folk artistry—presented not as “local color,” but as identity sustained through work.

Even the animals become part of the moral architecture of the home. The chapter on Nick, Fuehrer, and Toqui reads like a family legend—three dogs whose personalities (restless freedom, firm leadership, protective loyalty) mirror the household itself: affectionate, disciplined, and shaped by the land they guard.

Inside this book you’ll find:

A vivid rural childhood shaped by labor, school, and the warmth of an “eternal flame.”
A love story tested by distance—and strengthened by return.
A home in Santa Juana where hospitality becomes an ethic, not a performance.
Portraits of women who carry families through steadiness rather than spectacle.
Chilean tradition lived from the inside: music, craft, folklore, and trade.

The book includes an Editor’s Note: A Way In that frames the reading experience as recognition rather than revelation, a dedication by Fabiola, and a prologue by Bernardo—a triad of voices that makes clear what this memoir is ultimately offering: not drama, but continuity; not performance, but presence; not a life explained, but a life lovingly held.