Tanya Mosley

The bathroom is the only place April Soto can escape her small, chaotic life.

She's 26 years old and lives in a Philadelphia row house with her mother, grandmother, and her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle.

She's the book's anti-hero, volatile, quick to anger, driven by a heat she calls the white hot.

The bathroom is where she goes to cool down or disappear.

Until one day, April visits her daughter Noelle's school and sees an art project, a drawing of their home.

And there April is, locked in the bathroom.

The hiding place she believed was private had actually never been a secret at all.

Her daughter had been watching the whole time.

This realization hits hard, sparking an urgent need to run, and so April buys a one-way bus ticket to the farthest place she can find.

The white hot unfolds as a letter, a mother writing to the daughter she left behind, trying to explain the choice that changed both of their lives.

Hudes won the Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, which explored addiction and trauma in a Puerto Rican-American family.

She also wrote the book In the Heights and adapted it for the screen.

And her memoir, My Broken Language, traced her multi-generational upbringing in Philadelphia, a world she explores in the white hot.

Kiara, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thanks.

I'm excited to talk.

There are very few acts we judge more harshly than a mother who leaves her child, who abandons her child.

And as I'm reading the book, I was wondering how you let go of that judgment to bring life into April, if you ever even held that judgment to begin with.

You know, April, I mean, she's very clear.

She has this understanding that her words can't really justify why she left, but the words really is all that she has.