Malibu Park resident and novelist Louise Cabral, 88, has pioneered a writing method she calls “lifewriting.”
By Michael Aushenker / Special to The Malibu Times
Decades ago, Louise Cabral launched what she calls “lifewriting,” a philosophy detailed in her book “Islands of Recall.”
“I teach people to write the story of their lives beginning with their earliest memories, all the way up to today” the 88-year-old novelist and writing instructor says. “While they’re doing that, they’re keeping a journal.”
Such writing will be the focal point of a party dubbed “Write it and Read it” that she will host this Saturday at 2 p.m. at her funky, expansive Malibu Park home. The only prerequisite is that attendees come armed with half a page of introspective writing about an incident in their lives. Beginning with childhood, the point of Cabral’s exercise is “to figure out who you were, to know who you are.”
And what a life Cabral herself has had. The daughter of European immigrants who met at a radicals’ rally in Philadelphia several years after World War I, Cabral grew up surrounded by the arts. Her upbringing informed the rest of her life. In her nine decades, Cabral has married a post-Cubist painter, authored six novels and raised two children.
Living her life, as she puts it, “88 going on 28,” Cabral works out every other day, tools around town with her assistant and plays piano daily, tickling the ivories to evoke Chopin, Bach and Rachmaninoff.
“She wears me out,” admitted Michelle Fletcher, Cabral’s personal assistant of two years. “She’s a great inspiration. She goes to the gym every other day, she drives, she’s on Facebook, she has an iPhone. I’ve never seen anyone so involved, so animated.”
“I am very driven,” Cabral agrees. “I get up at 5 a.m. each day. If I don’t practice the piano for one day, I feel a terrible loss. Piano is the sustenance of my life.”
There’s no place Cabral would rather live than Malibu Park. Cabral’s astounding multitiered home overlooks a swathe of Santa Monica Mountains. Prior to Malibu, Cabral lived in the Mulholland Drive home built in 1985 by her artist husband, Flavio Emanuel Cabral. Flavio died in 1990. Louise and Flavio had two children: Barien Cabral, who works with Indian reservations in Santa Fe, also plays flamenco guitar. Their daughter, singer Denise Cabral, lives in Kobe, Japan. Cabral also has three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Seven years ago, at age 80, Cabral remarried. Judge Paul Wyler passed away last year.
Cabral is currently cataloguing 300 of Flavio’s oil paintings, many of which reflect a post-Cubism approach he called “Spherism” and adorn the walls of her home. She intends to mount an exhibit of Flavio’s work soon.
Cabral enjoys hosting classical concerts at home and staging the one-woman play “Millay and Me,” her tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay, the early 20th-century Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and feminist. She inherited her appreciation of the arts from her parents.
Her Russian mother worshipped Isadora Duncan, the founder of modern expressive dance. Her Polish father divined inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the foremost theorist of the anarchist movement. In fact, her parents met at a radicals’ rally in Philadelphia.
Her father, Moishe Constabler, left Warsaw for Philadelphia, changing his surname to “Cohen” upon reaching Ellis Island. When Hitler rose to power in Germany, one of his three sisters married and relocated to Palestine. But he lost the other two, who disappeared during World War II.
“My father never knew what became of them,” Cabral said.
Just as she preaches, Cabral’s writing is powered by the experiences of herself and her family. Her novel, “World Beyond the Pale,” is loosely based on her parents’ lives. A young Jewish girl in Russia falls in love with a radical activist and idealist. In the story, she also explores the tragic past of her father’s family, as part of a promise she made to her father shortly before he died to make “a monument with my words” to them and the millions of other Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
“Write It and Read It” will take place Saturday, June 9 from 2 to 4 p.m. To RSVP for “Write It and Read It,” call 818.707.0589.
To learn more about Cabral, visit LouiseCabral.com. To see her late husband’s art, visit FlavioCabral.com.