Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Kiara Alegria-Hudies, writer of In the Heights, Water by the Spoonful, and the memoir My Broken Language. She recently published her first novel, The White Hot, and it opens in a locked bathroom. 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.
Chapter 2: What is the premise of Kiara Alegría Hudes' novel 'The White Hot'?
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, the book came out a few months ago, and the more time and distance I am separated from its active writing, the more I'm reflecting on it. And I almost started to cry when you asked the question because it makes me emotional that April is this antihero. She's done the unthinkable. She's left her child. And we know that from the beginning. It's not a spoiler.
But what the book doesn't detail as much because it's just a given is that she didn't leave her child. She stayed with her child. When she was pregnant as a high schooler, as a teenager, the dad saw that and wanted no part of it and he took off. So she actually made it – she's the one that made the decision to stay.
And I wonder if even me writing the story of her leaving and not the story of her staying did her a slight disservice. But I don't think so.
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Chapter 3: Who is April Soto and what challenges does she face?
I think that she has this message to give to her estranged daughter, who she left when she was 10 years old. And she wants this daughter to know, look, I stayed for 10 years, but here's what it's like to be a woman who takes her life into her own hands. and who has agency. And maybe I waited too long to learn these lessons. Maybe you can learn these lessons a little bit sooner.
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. And so she writes her daughter this letter, as you said, to be read when Noelle is 18 years old. And it's about specifically the first 10 days after she left. So I'd like for you to read this passage.
And if you can start with, I have told you about these 10 days.
I have told you about these ten days, Noé, hoping some of it might be useful as you determine what kind of woman to be. We are stuck with the project of becoming ourselves, a task we ignore to our great peril. Do not absolve me. Do not forgive me. Only hear me. Consider my story. Up until age ten, you saw matriarchs following the doctrine of duty.
But now, through my betrayal, you've seen an alternate way. Whichever path you choose, at least you know it's not the only option. Freedom is a brutal assignment with many punishments. Conformity's punishments can be even harsher, though they're often less visible. Blow out your candles. Be careful what you don't wish for. The curiosities you're too successful to speak.
The hungers that threaten disruption. In one of the books about women who leave their children, remember The Librarian's List? A narrator says something like, sometimes you have to escape in order not to die. I don't think the tricky part is the escape. Abandonment is easy. Any fool can do it. No wonder dads leave all the time. Siddhartha was neither noble and questing nor depraved.
He was a dude acting on a whim. No. The real challenge is noticing you are dying in the first place because it happens incrementally, year by year, and camouflages itself as life.
Thank you for reading that. We heard April reference Siddhartha. That's the book from Herman Hesse of 1922. It's about a man who leaves his family to find himself. We call that Enlightenment. When I finished the book, I was really reflecting on this, like April's envy of that freedom that Siddhartha has. I mean, that's clear. Although with April, it's called abandonment.
And when did you first identify that double standard?
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Chapter 4: How does Kiara Alegría Hudes explore motherhood and abandonment in her work?
So... I had really thought of it as kind of a fantasy in some ways when I wrote it. And here was my mom actually pointing out to me, no, this reflects the reality you grew up in.
Why was rage the emotion for April? Why was rage the white hot?
I think it's not an emotion I have such healthy and direct access to. And so I wanted to explore that through a fictional character. You know, what is anger? What purpose does it serve in our lives? It's mostly been the province of men in popular culture and in cultural narratives. You know, what is an angry woman?
And is there a way that anger can be productive actually in addition to its destructive components? And one of the things we discover in April's story is that as a child, she witnessed a pretty traumatic act of violence. Now, those of us who are familiar with PTSD know that when faced with something that triggers that memory, it's fight or flight. It's freeze or fawn.
And so I wanted to write this character who fought. She didn't fight when she witnessed this violent act. Instead, she got into schoolyard fights on the playground. And she became a really good fighter. And that got her into a lot of trouble.
And really, the book is about her transforming this kind of raw elemental energy that she's been overly easily tapped into, which is her rage, transforming its power into a different source and release in her life by the end of her 10-day journey in this book.
Yeah. So much of your work keeps returning to Philadelphia, which we're going to talk about. But your origin goes back even further to Puerto Rico, your grandmother's journey to this country. She took her own quest. She took her hero's journey to come to Philadelphia. What did you grow up knowing about that journey?
It was neat growing up in Philadelphia and hearing my elder stories from Puerto Rico, where they came from. My abuela came with her daughters in tow, so my mom was 12 years old when they all arrived in Philadelphia. Now, they originated in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is a coastal town, and they were farmers. And there's varying points of view on why they left.
Everyone has a slightly different story. It's quite a Rashomon sort of narrative. Maybe they left because there had been a kind of infidelity from her partner. Maybe they left because my eldest aunt needed better health care than was available to treat a condition she was facing. The thing I loved about hearing these stories is they were holy, holy, holy, unlike the world that was familiar to me.
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