Writer Quiara Alegría Hudes On ‘White Hot’ Rage
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This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Chiara Allegria Hughes, 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 ten 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 she 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. Hughie's won the Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, which explored addiction and trauma in a Puerto Rican American family.
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