The story is about a young girl who is trapped in a mudslide, and a reporter, Rolf Carl¨¦, who is sent in his television helicopter to cover her rescue. Unable to maintain his reporter¡¯s objectivity, he joins in the unsuccessful rescue attempt, and then stays with the girl until she dies. As he talks with the girl over a period of days, Carl¨¦ remembers and begins to address his own youthful suffering, which he has repressed for many years. At a further remove, the girl and the reporter are being watched on television by the narrator, Carl¨¦¡¯s lover, who experiences the pain of both.
Allende has often spoken about ¡®¡®And of Clay Are We Created¡¯¡¯ and its importance to her. The characters of the television reporter and his lover are both based on Allende¡¯s own experiences in journalism. In an interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell, she explains that the plot of the story is also based on fact: ¡®¡®This story really occurred. In 1985, we saw her on every television screen in the world, the face of Omaira S¨¢nchez, one of the thousands of victims of Colombia¡¯s Nevado Ruiz volcanic eruption. The black eyes of that girl have haunted me. . . . She is telling me something. She is talking to me about patience, about endurance, about courage.¡¯¡¯ Reviewers of The Stories of Eva Luna have praised Allende¡¯s ability to adapt historical events into fiction, as she does in ¡®¡®And of Clay Are We