Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, composer, and novelist whose work has reshaped contemporary American theater. The co-creator of In the Heights and author of Water by the Spoonful, she has consistently explored identity, family, and belonging across theater, music, memoir, and now fiction in her new book, The White Hot.
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, composer, and novelist whose work has reshaped contemporary American theater. The co-creator of In the Heights and author of Water by the Spoonful, she has consistently explored identity, family, and belonging across theater, music, memoir, and now fiction in her new book, The White Hot.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I know if you stare directly into the sun, you go blind. If we look directly at our mothers, will we go blind or can we see them? Can we see them just once?
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with Quiara Alegría Hudes about her first novel and the lessons she learned from writing it.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I’m 48 years old. Who am I living this life for?
Debbie Millman:
Quiara Alegría Hudes is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, composer, and novelist whose work has reshaped contemporary American theater. She’s the co-creator of In The Heights, the groundbreaking musical that helped redefine whose stories belong at the center of the American stage. Her play Water by the Spoonful earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and her writing across theater, music, memoir, and now fiction has consistently explored identity, family, belonging, and the complicated inheritance of culture and care.
We first spoke on Design Matters when Quiara released her memoir, My Broken Language, a book that traced her coming of age at the intersection of language, lineage, and spiritual worlds. Our interview took a deep dive into Quiara’s life and career. In our interview today, we’ll be talking about her extraordinary new novel, The White Hot, a riveting story about rage and restraint, motherhood and freedom, desire and time, and how becoming oneself can come at devastating cost. Quiara, welcome back to Design Matters.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Thank you so much. I’m excited to talk a second time with you.
Debbie Millman:
Me too. Quiara, you’ve described writing and reading in recent years as something that saved your life. How so?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes. I had a hard time in the last handful of years, had to stop writing for a while and became a full-time caretaker for a loved one who was not well. And so that was profoundly stressful. Just took a lot of time. Was also depressing and I lost my spark a little bit. During this period, reading is what tethered me to the fact that I still had an inner life. I felt so deadened. I felt like a zombie because my entire being was revolving around caring for someone else. And yet, when I read, and I’ll never forget the books I read during this period, I still existed. I was still in there somewhere. And so I understood in a new and very literal way how people have said books saved me. That happened to me.
Debbie Millman:
What books were you reading?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
So this is a very beloved bibliography. I read The Door by Magda Szabó. It really rocked my soul. All the books that I’m about to list have something in common that they’re about women who are pariahs, women who are outcasts in their communities or in their own lives and families and spheres. Sula by Toni Morrison. First time I had read it, Sula literally scurs her best friend’s husband and doesn’t find the fault in it because there’s pleasure there and she still considers the friendship valid. I mean, these things that just bent my mind. Reread Beloved. Of course, Sethe does the ultimate terrible thing, which I won’t mention for those who haven’t read it. But the reread was important for me.
So here I am grappling with these terrible outcast women and just clinging to their humanity for dear life and feeling that the personhood, the groundedness, the specificity they can find in their experiments, in their own agency are deeply hopeful for me. Another one I have to mention is Jamaica Kincaid, Autobiography of my Mother. Here was a character, Xuela, who was hated by many people, but she loved herself unconditionally. In the presence of that hate surrounding her, I had never read a female character who loved herself unconditionally. So these are the women who held me and said, “You have a self” at this time in my life.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve spent your career thus far moving between forms; music, theater, film, memoir, and now the novel. What drove you to fiction?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
The story I was telling asked for it. So The White Hot, for those who have read it, the first two central scenes, one is a dysfunctional family dinner table. This is a mainstay, a staple of the American theater. So at this point, it was still a play in my mind and I wrote it out as a play scene. And there’s also an early scene in a principal’s office where she’s arguing with the principal. Again, I wrote this for the stage. Then the next few scenes, she gets on a Greyhound bus, going who knows where? She’s never left Philadelphia before. And so she’s seeing… She’s 26 years old. She’s lived a very small life. Her name is April. April Soto. And she’s just quietly looking out the window of this Greyhound bus, and that quiet was essential. And that doesn’t work on stage. So I said, “What do I do now?”
And then, when she gets off that bus, she wanders into the woods for the first time in her life. She’s never been in the wilderness before. She starts to get blisters. Blisters aren’t going to read on stage. Who cares about blisters from the back row of a theater? You can’t even see them. So when the story started getting quieter and quieter and slowing down, things started happening that just, they’re not good for dramatizing. And I said, “I want this to whisper in the reader’s ear.” I started to realize this book needed to whisper, the story needed to whisper. And so I pivoted to an experiment in my first with a novel.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve described The White Hot as the most honest thing you’ve written, and that fiction allowed you to be darker, more honest, and freer than writing from life. How did you allow yourself that freedom?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Part of it was this reading that I mentioned earlier. After reading Sula, after reading The Door, there was another book called The Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. After reading about Xuela in Autobiography of my Mother, I said, there’s really no going back from reading that shook me that much. I can’t be so polite anymore. I can’t ask for permission anymore. I’m either going to go deeper and deeper and get more real, peel back the layers of my own curiosity, of my own inner journey. Even though the story, the plot is fictional, the personal excavation, the layers of a contradicting heart as a woman, as a mother, as a daughter, as an intellectual, as a student, I had to really be true to that reading list. I had to grab that baton and run with it. And so that’s why it got realer, I think, than I’ve been in the past.
Debbie Millman:
The White Hot is about a mother who leaves her daughter in pursuit of enlightenment and self-discovery. And you said that, in some ways, you got the initial seed of this story when you were in high school. Really? Really?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
It’s funny how stories, it’s just that little piece of sand in your oyster. And you don’t know. It just irks you. It’s just an irritant in your life. And then it might be years, in this case, decades pass that you start to look at it and you start to see a truth form around that irritant. In this case, I read Siddhartha, the Hermann Hesse novel when I was in high school, and I loved it. And that is something I stole for the novel. Our lead character also does read that in high school and has strong feelings about it.
I loved the book. It’s a fictional telling of the Buddha story. I was moved and inspired as a teenager by someone abandoning all they know, their worldly circle, to go find the meaning of life. It resonates with an adolescent. And so by the same kind of breath, in the same breath, I was pissed. I was pissed. And I was like, “This frickin prince, man.” I wanted my mom to stop doing the dishes, walk at our house, and go find the meaning of her life. I wanted my abuela to stop raising all the babies in the family, walk out the door, go on her spiritual pilgrimage. But they didn’t have the luxury of abandoning their domestic responsibilities. Siddhartha did.
And so it was aspirational, but also to me, a tale about gendered discovery. And so I just, decades later, I’m like, my female protagonist, my anti-hero, she’s walking out the door. She’s taken her journey.
Debbie Millman:
12 years ago, you were asked to write a stage musical to Alanis Morissette’s blockbuster album, Jagged Little Pill. What was the play that you wrote about at that time?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yeah. So it’s funny, not every musical comes to fruition, and that one didn’t. But I spent about a year listening nonstop to that incredible album. One of the things that I really loved about it being an adult and not a teenager anymore when I had first heard it was just her easy access to just 10 out of 10 volume emotions, whether it’s playfulness, whether it’s curiosity, whether it’s horniness, whether it’s fury, whether it’s bitterness. It’s like, she turns on the tap and the water just flows. And as an adult, I didn’t have that same connection to my emotions, but I remember when I did as a teenager, and I started to walk down memory lane with that very emotional self.
And so I wanted to write a play about a young woman with big emotions who has a spiritual journey. Because one of the things I love about Alanis’s music is that, here she is, she’s pissed, she comes and she confronts her ex. But then she’s also talking about, “I want to find God. I’m going to take a stroll through the park. I’m going to find God.” I loved those conflicting emotions just right up next to each other. And so yeah, I started developing this story in my head. And then it outgrew that project. And so I took that story with me and it became The White Hot.
Debbie Millman:
When the director of the play joined the development team, she wanted to go in a different direction. Your story went with you as you just said, and you kept developing the character April Soto. Was April Soto the character that would’ve been in the play?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes. [inaudible 00:11:50].
Debbie Millman:
You had that name.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You said that your ideas lived in little snippets that you threw into a box. It’s very visual. I’m imagining you doing that. 10 years later, you thought you were ready to take it all out of the box. What gave you that sense in that moment?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think it was being an older, wiser woman who had asked for permission long enough. I was a couple decades into my professional playwriting career. Something happened where year after year, I was auditioning my plays. And I started to see a pattern. And all of these plays, I guess maybe with the exception of one or two, but pretty much every play I’ve written includes a young Latina character. So seeing hundreds of real talent come through the door, just powerhouse actor after powerhouse actor, year after year. And there was one common thread, and it really started to weigh me down. And this common thread was a sense of asking permission before taking up space. This doe-eyed, “Am I okay to be here? Am I offending anyone?”
And I was like, “What is this common thread?” A sense that their role was to make us as the people auditioning them comfortable. And then working in the rehearsal room with a lot of these young actors, a sense of that their responsibility is to make us comfortable, to put us at ease. And really that was irking me because I saw that tendency in myself too. And I remember talking to one actor and saying, “Can we do this scene?” This character is really happy in the scene. But they don’t have to smile to show us that they’re happy. They can just feel happy. They don’t need to indicate that they’re happy.
And so we kept trying to break down our facial muscles. We were doing it together in the mirror. Can we actually feel happy rather than having to show someone else we’re happy so they know we’re okay. And so it’s this gendered repetition of performing pleasant femininity and pleasant femaleness that I think I outgrew. And I said, “I want to write a character who just doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. She’s not asking for permission. She doesn’t care about likability. She doesn’t care about making people comfortable. I’m ready for that in my life. Can I dip my toe in the water through this fictional character, through April Soto?”
So I pulled out that box. I started looking through my notes. I said, “Yeah. Not only is she going to be an antihero and do an unthinkable thing, like leave her daughter, but she’s going to do it in a pretty in-your-face way. I’m going to give that to the reader. I’m not going to…” It’s not a, “Hear-me-out. I’m innocent. I’m so sorry.” It’s a, “Nope. I did it and it really hurt me and it really hurt you, and I’m going to talk about that. Let’s just talk about it.”
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I heard recently, it was actually in the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, where towards the end of the movie, the actual serial killer says that the fear of offending is stronger than the fear of pain. And I was thinking about that as I was preparing my questions and planning our interview for today, thinking about how so many people live their lives constantly aware of how what they’re doing is affecting others rather than themselves.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And the need to make other people comfortable because we don’t want to offend somebody. And that whatever pain that might bring to ourselves is just accepted and just part of the process of living. Where does April’s courage to step into herself come from?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think it starts with this sense of not having a self. We learn early on, she is just very well-burst in the art of self-disappearance, in the art of numbing, in the art of turning the volume off on her life, on her heart, in her mind. She puts on headphones and she listens to nature sounds, a nature soundscape. She blasts it so that she can’t hear anything else. She has this mantra she tells herself, “Dead inside, dead inside, dead inside,” so that she numbs herself to her environment. And she works. Her job is tallying receipts at a local construction company.
And even just the way she approaches the… She’s tallying the receipts on an adding machine or in the computer. And even just the way she approaches that data entry, it’s soothing to her. She can get into a state of nothingness, of non-existence while doing that. And yet, by the same token, she freaks out. She has panic attacks. She has severe anger issues. She got into a lot of trouble in high school because she got into fights in school. And so there’s just moments when that numbing, it just doesn’t work. And this rage comes through. This is what is referred to as The White Hot.
And that’s what happens. It’s not that she gains the courage to question those things, it’s that it becomes so severe. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, if you’ve ever gotten violent with someone, if you’ve ever felt suicidal, these are experiences that are so urgent and primal. It’s like you’re running from a burning building. You’re not making decisions. You’re not being strategic. You’re actually saving yourself it feels like. And so that’s what initiates it. So she’s at the dinner table and it’s just that sense of, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. Run. Get out of here. Get out of here. I’m going to die.”
Debbie Millman:
Over the course of my life, I’ve experienced several, many white hots of my own. And I’ve experienced it as fury taking over my whole body. Now I know through lots and lots and lots of therapy that a lot of it is cortisol and that response to try to stay alive and defend yourself. Was this fury or this rage something that you recognized in your own life or in the women you grew up around?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Not for me personally. I think I have more experience with the part of April that disassociates and numbs. So part of my healthy writing practice, part of my everyday practice is just to, when I’m feeling okay, do a little practice of getting into my body, don’t disassociate, be present, physically, emotionally, heart, space, spirit. In terms of that rage, that violence, yeah, I’ve seen that. First of all, I come from a family of fighters. I’m the quiet one in the corner. I went to Quaker meeting. Everyone’s like, “Who are you?” I was always impressed by their ability. “Just get it out. Get it out.” And it scared me. But I think it is actually part of a balanced emotional life if we can keep it reigned in and not too destructive.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it’s interesting because you describe The White Hot is a story about rage, but also about enlightenment. Did you always believe that those two forces could coexist?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I didn’t really know. Part of the question for me was, “Could I even understand anger?” As I had mentioned earlier, I’d come through a pretty challenging time in my life. And I was very numb, totally lost my appetite, couldn’t eat, couldn’t even have my morning coffee. I mean, you know it’s bad if I’m not having my morning coffee?
Debbie Millman:
Oh my god.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Even that. I lost my taste for that. And I wanted to come back to life. And I thought, “Is there part of me that can fight? Is there part of me that can scream?” And so I said, “Well, let me try on April Soto. Let me see if I can do it through her.” And what I found as I wrote it and as I tried her on for size was that there’s a source energy to her that her rage, that her anger is tapped into, it’s just over tapped into that channel. But that source energy is also the part of her that can experience divine joy. It’s the part of her that, towards the end, feels this profound, shocking oneness with her environment.
She’s walking by the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. And she’s overcome with this sense that she is a part of everything. It’s the first time in her life maybe she’s felt like she belongs to the world, she is of a peace with the world. And The White Hot is actually part of that too. So I think The White Hot in some ways becomes the source energy behind that rage. It’s not the rage itself.
Debbie Millman:
The walking along the river reminded me a little bit of Siddhartha’s journey along the river as well. But I thought it was really interesting that you chose to have April write an essay about Siddhartha titled, I think it was Why Siddhartha Sucks.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Talk about that a little bit.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Okay. So she isn’t much like me. It’s not very biographical. But one of the things I do have in common with April Soto is, sometimes in my high school, in my schooling journey in Philadelphia, I would get in trouble for… Being too smart sounds egotistical. So I don’t mean to say it that way. But I would just call a spade a spade and I’d get sent to the principal’s office. I would spend a lot of time in the principal’s office, and so does April Soto. She gets sent there because she fights in the schoolyard. I didn’t have that problem. But she also gets sent there because she’s too smart and they don’t know what to do with her.
And so this book report that I include in the book early on is exhibit A in this. She’s saying, “Screw this guy. He’s a baby daddy, just doing whatever he pleases. Good on him that he found God. Like I’d find God too if I could have all that time to walk through the woods and sit by the river.” So she loves the book. Something in the book engages her. It broadens her horizons. But it feels, at the same time, it’s almost taunting her how out of reach that potential narrative is in her life.
Debbie Millman:
She is a complicated woman. April Soto has had to live her life in service to her daughter, to her elders, and in many ways, to the emotional equilibrium of their shared household for women living together. And ultimately, she can’t. And we know from the first page of the book that she has left her daughter. The first two pages of the book are some of the most riveting I’ve read in a very long time. I’m wondering if you can share those first two pages of the book with our listeners today.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Thank you so much for saying that. I would be happy to. Noelle received the envelope eight years after her mother’s disappearance. She got home from school and found it propped on the counter, oversize and leaning against the microwave door, clearly placed there by her dad or stepmother to catch her eye. She ran a finger over the uppercase letters, NOELLE SOTO. It wasn’t the handwriting that dinged memories bell so much as the pen’s feral indentations. No sender was named above the return address but Noelle recognized those grooves like a gut recognizes a fist. The same ones she’d glimpsed on emergency contact forms, blue cards, brought into school in Septembers, on grocery lists carried to the corner store. Why did her mom press so hard for the littlest of nothings? Grooves that attacked the paper, letters like jackhammers.
One corner was ripped and a binder clip peeked through. She folded the torn flap and saw a return address in Pittsburgh, six hours away. Did that mean her mom had been close all this time or far? “Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,” the devil laughed in her ear. “Pittsburgh.” On the back, a note: To my daughter. An explanation. Do not open until your 18th birthday day. And so, with rumbling heart and saliva pasting tongue to teeth, fury’s alchemy gave her a mouthful of metal, Noelle plunged a finger into the manila corner and ripped open the fabric of her world.
Seven weeks left till graduation, till the long-awaited diploma, but no, adulthood began now with these loosely stacked pages and whatever explanation they might offer or claim to offer or fail to offer. Noelle devoured her mother’s words in three hours, standing by the microwave, before meeting her dad, stepmother, and brothers at the Italian restaurant where her birthday tiramisu would arrive with a glittering lit sparkler plunged into its core.
Debbie Millman:
That last line just kills me. I can see it. The candle in the tiramisu and the cream on top and the dent of the candle. It’s so visual. Thank you for sharing that. The next chapter begins April’s letter. And you mentioned earlier that your letter form allowed April’s voice to feel whispered directly into the reader’s ear. What did that level of intimacy make possible that a third person narrator couldn’t?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think, for one thing, accountability. Part of April Soto writing this letter to her daughter is taking accountability for her action. She says early on, “You don’t have to forgive me. In fact, it would be unfair of me to even ask that of you. But please hear me. I think I have a story that you might benefit from as a young woman who’s about to head out into the world. Lessons on womanhood, lessons on making decisions that will come with the cost.” I don’t know that a third person narration would have that same sense of accountability of I am owning this by saying it, by being real and plain about what I did.
And the other thing is, I think a low hum beneath the whole narrative is the tremendous amount of shame that April has grown up with. She mentions later in the book about a violent episode she witnessed as a young child. And I think a survivalist sense is born at that moment. “I’m going to survive. I’m going to survive.” But there’s also a sense of shame. “I couldn’t help. I couldn’t help.” And she’s grown with this shame. And this shame has spiraled into other avenues. She talks very frankly about her sexual experiences and shame surrounding those. She’s telling her daughter, “I left you. I didn’t get a chance to give you the birds and bees. So I’m going to tell you quite plainly about some mistakes I made in the sexual arena.”
And I just don’t know that this sense of shame would feel so palpable, again, with a third-person narrator. I think claiming and naming that shame is a very healing and painful and yet powerful act that April undertakes in that first-person letter writing.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I agree. I was thinking about it and felt that the third-person narration, I think, would provide a sense of judgment.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think that sense of judgment is really… In some ways, the reader is the third-person narration. And I’m really sculpting this letter with a sense, it is up to the reader to decide what they think about this. I don’t want to play that hand. I don’t want to nudge too far in one direction. Obviously, I believe April Soto has got a valuable narrative where I wouldn’t have shared it, but I’m not letting her off the hook, or calling her terrible with a judgment. I’m letting the reader do that, and maybe do it through Noelle’s eyes or maybe through their own eyes.
I think one of the fun things I experienced as I developed this book is, sometimes, I felt so much that I was Noelle, the daughter, the 18-year-old girl. Sometimes, I felt I was so much April, the young mother. I could put on both shoes at different times in the narrative.
Debbie Millman:
April recognizes that Noelle has inherited some of her white hot. And April says this about her own, I’m going to quote from the book, “An electric pulse pinged the right side of my neck, the telltale sign. I tried to mantra it away, ‘dead inside, dead inside, dead in-fucking-side. But the syllables laughed with a maniac’s howl, and then pop. A white hot blanket shrouded my body. A white hot veil blurred my vision in a milky sheen.” And then later on, April states, “My anger was not just a wrecking ball, but my dance partner and confidant, the only companion I had.” And then April says this about Noelle, “There it is, and mine alone to grasp Noelle’s own white heat.” Was April afraid of her daughter’s rage?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes, absolutely. One of the reasons why, at the beginning of the book, April’s going, “I got to get out of here. I got to get out of here.” is she might have realized, “I’ve come too far. This armor that has protected me, this white heat, this fighting sense, it has come to define me. I don’t have a self outside of this.” And as our armor often does, that armor is there for a good reason. She’s trying to protect herself. But she can’t quite take off that armor and put it next to her. It started to grow into her skin. And what happens early on is, her daughter starts getting in fights too. She gets into the principal’s office. Her daughter starts getting in trouble for being too smart also, gets sent to the principal’s office.
But that’s not what makes April run. What makes April run is, after the principal’s office, they’re at home, and her daughter is being sassy, is being rude, is being attitudinal, isn’t really owning up to the fact that she got in trouble. And she throws a plate on the ground. And abuela, the grandmother who they live with, gets the broom and starts to clean it up. And it’s seeing the broom, that’s what makes April totally freak out and lose it. And I think the reason is, it’s not that, “Oh, my daughter’s going to inherit my violence, my fighting.” It’s not, “Oh my gosh, my daughter’s too smart for her own good.” It’s, “Oh, my daughter’s going to inherit that broom.” She could see it. Once that broom comes out, she’s like, “That’s my daughter’s future. What do I do? What do I do? I don’t know. I got to run. I got to get out of here.”
And I think that part of April deciding years later to write this letter to her daughter is saying, “You don’t have to inherit that broom. You might choose to. That might be your truth. But it’s not a foregone conclusion on your path.”
Debbie Millman:
April states this about her mother and grandmother. “There is a legacy of departure and seeking, Noelle, that is your inheritance too. Despite all the domestic play acting, you are born of journey women. Know this. Remember this when you step toward places you’re not meant to go.” What is it about April and Noelle that is different from their elders?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
So this is something I saw in my own family too, and in the community, in North Philly, in the Puerto Rican community in Philadelphia, where the generation above me, my mom, my grandmother, they all came. My mom came from Puerto Rico when she was 12. They left everything they knew behind. I mean, I can’t fathom the amount of imagination it takes to do that, to say, “We’re going to go somewhere else and we’re going to live a new life in a new way.” So they take this big journey. They get to Philadelphia. And then, here they are in the fourth most segregated city in the nation. And the Puerto Rican community is so… It’s as if invisible walls surround it. I’m talking about the time I grew up. Perhaps it has changed. But life becomes very small. It becomes almost enclosed into a block. The block becomes the ecosystem after this tremendous journey.
And I think the danger of that is that the next generation can therefore go, “Oh, life is meant to be small,” and can really lose touch with the reality of the tremendous adventure that was taken, the tremendous imagination that was harnessed by the generation above them. And so, April realizes that. When she’s on that Greyhound bus, she’s like, “Wait a second. The generation above me has taken a much bigger adventure than this. This is the first time I’m leaving Philly. What the heck?” She has to learn that. It’s not obvious to her.
Debbie Millman:
The entirety of April’s letter, her story, unfolds over just 10 days, yet it contains the entirety of April’s self-reckoning. Why 10 days?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Gosh. That’s a good question. I mean, part of it was… So I’m taking some cues from Siddhartha, from the book. It’s not an adaptation of it, but it’s definitely in conversation with it. So I knew she was going to learn a big lesson by the river. As we mentioned, that’s the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. I knew she was going to… There’s a whole part of Siddhartha where he becomes an ascetic and he walks into the woods and he relinquishes all worldly possessions. And so I knew I was going to have something like that in the woods. And so then of course I have to research, okay, how long can she really survive in the woods without food? She has to find fresh water. I address that. And so 10 days is a little bit tethered to that reality.
And Siddhartha, he finds a wealthy courtesan who teaches him the art of love. I wanted April, I mean, just for my own pleasure in writing the book, I wanted her to have some real pleasure. I wanted to write her some real pleasure. But what I didn’t anticipate was how short-lived that pleasure would be because of what happens with her. And the man she meets, Kamal, he asks her to do something that is really intense, and she agrees, but there’s no going back from that. So that keeps it a little bit short. It’s not like they were going to fall in love and be together for months. It actually happens over just a short series of days. So those are some of the reasons why it stays in the ten-day realm.
But I think once she’s ripped off that band-aid, once she’s left, just getting to a place where she’s not in the emergency that is her daily life anymore, she just really starts to see things much, much more clearly now. And she remembers, “Oh my gosh, my daughter has another parent. Where the heck has he been? What is going on? Why am I the martyr in this situation? Where’s the accountability here?” So she’s also putting these pieces together too with more urgency and immediacy than she would’ve been able to have at home.
Debbie Millman:
One of my favorite lines in the book is in response to someone telling Noelle that she had potential. And April states, “Wake up Noelle. Someone says you got potential means you ain’t shit at present.” What does April think of her daughter?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think April is intimidated by her daughter because her daughter is, A, emotionally intelligent, and B, honest as heck. And that sense of, “She can see our armor and our domestic pantomiming in a way that I’m not even willing to see.” And when I say our, just to note that April and Noelle live in a house with two other women in their family. So there’s four generations of Soto women all in one household. There’s no men around. And they all have their own particular ways to disassociate or avoid conflict. They just have really no skills in conflict resolution. So they all go about it in a different way.
And so I think the love and respect she has for her daughter tips into, she’s scared that her daughter’s smarts are going to be silenced. She’s scared that her daughter’s emotional acuity is going to be blunted. And then, I think my favorite part of how she feels about her daughter is just utter all-encompassing tenderness. So when I knew that April’s going to leave her, this is where the story is going. And you heard at the beginning of it, we know from the beginning she’s left. I said, there has to be a laying on of hands. There has to be a moment of really sacred tenderness. And so I knew there’s going to be a bath scene. There’s going to be a bath scene. And she’s going to wash her daughter. She’s going to braid her daughter’s hair. She’s going to take soap to her daughter’s skin.
We learned that there was a traumatic birth story, that Noelle wasn’t really born in the healthiest of ways. We don’t really learn all the details. We just hear about the aftermath of it. But in some ways, I was thinking when I wrote this mother bathing her 10-year-old daughter, this is the healthy birth that the two of them never got to experience. This is her having a natural birth that they never got the first time around. And so it closes that circle. And so that tenderness of a mother’s waters, I think that’s really important in how April feels about her daughter.
Debbie Millman:
The notion of April being aware of her daughter’s potential felt to me like the underlining foundation of the whole story. That this is a story of two potentials, really.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I read that when you shared the book with your daughter and your husband, they had different perspectives about the story and how they felt about April. For me, that line, that understanding of the various pathways that Noelle has that could be provided in that moment is what I think defines for me, defines April.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I mean, speaking as a parent myself to two children, to two teenagers, one of the most overwhelming and amazing experiences of it is, they can do things I can’t do, and they can see the world in ways I’ve never been able to see the world. And it’s amazing. And it’s humbling. There’s a memory that April discusses in the book of the first time she gave her daughter crayons. And she puts crayons in Noelle’s hand. And we know from the beginning of the book, Noelle’s a young artist. She loves to draw. Actually the first scene is a school art presentation, and she’s really talented and she’s done a pretty impressive drawing.
So April remembers the first time she put crayons in her daughter’s hand. And one hand wasn’t enough. So she put crayons in the other hand. And Noelle starts coloring with both hands and she’s telling her mom, “Look, look, look.” And it overwhelms April so much because it’s like she already knows, “I don’t have the skill of looking like you do. You’ve got this skill. Show me. Can I live up to your skill? Do I merit your skill as your parent?” Yeah. That sense of, “They can do stuff I can’t do. Am I going to mess it up? Am I going to thwart them? I hope not.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, April says, at that point, “I was full of unvoiced bad thoughts then. And though your presentation contained pride, tenderness even, you had diagrammed me in the act of being my unbearable self and gotten it at A.” Killed me. That killed me.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Just hearing that, it’s like, there’s an alternate universe where they both grow up healthy and they’re these smart women and they really can get off on each other’s intellect and they can really grapple with each other, but it’s not the life they got. They dealt a hand that is a little too hard for them to do that. But maybe, maybe one day. We don’t know where their story ends. We get one ending, we don’t get the ending.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk to you about that in a bit. Over the course of Alice’s 10-day journey, she takes her first walk in the woods, she takes refuge from a storm in a cave, she sees her first shooting star, she hears jazz for the first time, which is just a spectacular, spectacular scene. She throws her shoes away and continues walking barefoot. She has a glorious orgasm. Music plays a really powerful role in your book, and Charles Mingus in particular becomes a companion. You’ve spoken about structuring the novel almost like a Mingus album and have stated chaos held inside of discipline. How conscious were you of rhythm and tempo as you were writing? How did Mingus influence the journey of this story?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yeah. It’s put it on every day. Get into that place that is not intellectual. Even though the story I’m writing is intellectual, certainly the compositions Mingus is creating our intellectual. And yet, breaking out of the small confines of that intellectual act into a looser expressive act. So I’m listening to it every day as I’m looking at my pin board that’s got all my notes on it. And I’m trying to create order out of chaos, which is my notes, my thoughts, my ideas. But you don’t want too much order. Because then it’s an essay, then it’s just a logical thing. So it’s finding that right balance between chaos and cohesion.
And Mingus was great for that. Mingus gave me clues every day I would listen. And then I would just intuitively work from that energy that I heard. And sometimes, I would listen to a slow song, and sometimes, I would listen to a fast song depending on where I was at in the novel. But I’ve always really loved working intuitively from musical structures to take my cues for narrative structures. Musicians are really good at this, figuring out where it’s time to slow down, where it’s time to speed up, where it’s time to keep it soft, where it’s time to let it explode. It’s not just the poets that are good at this. The musicians give us a lot of clues.
Debbie Millman:
You just used the word time quite a bit. And I want to talk to you about time. Because time feels like an actual character in The White Hot. You stated this about the notion of time in theater. The playwright’s basic unit is time. You’ll have two hours of the audience’s time. You are forcing an audience to experience the play at the same rate together. On the page, the reader can step away, pause, reread. Did writing The White Hot impact how you think about time and storytelling?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
That’s an interesting question. I have said at the beginning of the book that Noelle reads the letter in three hours. So she’s reading at a cliff. She’s a speed reader. Maybe she’s jumping ahead to the end. Maybe she’s wondering, “Where is this going?” But I didn’t have a notion that the reader of the book would do it in one sitting. I’ve heard from readers that they’ve read it in one sitting. I’ve heard from readers they’ve read it in two sittings. And I’ve heard from others that it’s, “Oh, I had to put it down for a few weeks and then do my life and then get back to it.”
I think rather than having a sense of time as I wrote The White Hot, it was really relinquishing that sense of control, for the first time. I’m very aware of it when I’m writing for the stage. But for the book, I thought, “I can be super intense here. Because if it’s too much for the reader, they can just put it down, and they can go chop vegetables for their salad for dinner that night.” So it did let me, in some ways, get a little more intense than I would allow myself to on stage. It can be a little unrelenting. I knew I wanted the book to start like you were getting shot out of a cannon, just super, super intense. That big rolling ball in Indiana Jones that he has to duck under. I was like, that’s what I want, the emotional experience at the beginning of this book to be.
Now, if I was doing it on stage, I’d allow that for maybe 10, 12 minutes max. Then it’s like, give the audience a joke. Let them breathe, let them exhale. But I actually was like, “I think I can push it a little longer on the page.” And really, it’s almost, I think like 40 pages before I let them breathe. And that’s okay, because they can choose to breathe if they want.
Debbie Millman:
There’s a pivotal moment in the book when April pleads for time. Not love, not absolution, but time. And she states, “I want a decade.” And you said that when you wrote it, you ugly cried. What provoked that particular emotion?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Something still overtakes me now hearing that. And maybe there is some part of me that relates to April there. It’s not literally what she says. It’s that she’s saying for the first time in this book and maybe in her life something she actually wants. Why should that be so hard? Why should it be a milestone to simply say, “Here’s something I want out of my life.” And yet it feels like it’s a brand new muscle for her, not just to say it, but to admit it to herself in order that it might be said. That’s where she starts to have a self, I think, where she starts to let that self open the door on that self and give it some air, let it breathe. So that’s everything. I mean, that’s the whole book there. There’s something I want out of my life, and I’m saying it out loud.
Debbie Millman:
In the novel, April encounters a librarian who introduces her to a lineage of “bad mothers” and tells her about the mother who murders her own child in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as you mentioned, Medea killing her own children, and even references Joni Mitchell giving up her baby for adoption. Why was it important for April to discover that she wasn’t the only, again, “bad mother in the world”?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I think shame makes us feel that we’re completely alone. Whereas, in fact, she is part of a lineage. Another part of that list that the librarian gives her is women who had abortions, who said, “I’m not up for this now. I’m not up for motherhood now.” So I think, to feel that for April to go, “Oh, I’m not inventing the wheel with this. This has been hard for other women.” And they told the world about it, not, “Oh, it was hard for other women” and they kept it to themselves, but they spread the news about that challenge. So she says about that, that she almost feels that she’s inducted into a secret society, that she’s like, “I’m part of something. And what I’m part of is the fact that this is hard.”
I didn’t write it there. It’s more implicit. But it also helps her see her mother and her grandmother as part of a lineage too, which is, it was hard for them too. So I think that sense… Sometimes, our checkboxes can feel a little small. I think, in the publishing industry, the demographics of how our work is marketed… Certainly in theater, I felt this way too. It’s like, “Oh, it’s a Latino play.” Or, “It’s a Philadelphia play.” And so I just wanted to spin that demographic a little bit to be like, “What about this ancient as human history demographic of parenthood?” That’s something that she’s part of too, and maybe has never quite been able to articulate.
Debbie Millman:
As I was reading the book and as I was researching and reading the various interviews, some really wonderful interviews that you had about the book, do you think that April left Noelle? Or do you think that April abandons her? Because I think there’s a difference.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I see things also from Noelle’s point of view. And if you’ve had your heart broken, if you’ve been left by a parent, part of you will always feel abandoned. That’s not the whole truth of the story, but that will always be a part of that experience. I think that April left her daughter. I think that April modeled for her daughter a different sort of womanhood than her daughter would’ve ever seen otherwise. And I think that is to her daughter’s benefit. I also think April chose her daughter and April stayed with her daughter. She did that for the first 10 years of her life. She’s not writing the book about that.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
But she did that. She chose her at a time when the father did not. So all of those things to me are true. It may be about how big each piece of the pie is there. But I’ve rarely felt that there’s one word or one emotion that fully encapsulates a situation like that.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that April is a bad mother?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
No. I don’t. To a much, much lesser degree. I think about this with my own childhood and when I had my first child. The truth is, after about five weeks, after about six weeks, I don’t remember. Maybe it was more like two or three months. But pretty early on, I was like, “Okay, I’m ready to write again. I’m ready to work again.” And there was a little hippie daycare in the basement of our building that we lived in on the Upper West Side, a little family daycare. And so I put my daughter there. And it was really hard for me. I felt terrible. I felt guilty. I was crying. I called up my mom. I said, “I feel so terrible. But I want to write again. I want to do my thing.”
And my mom was like, “What are you talking about? You were with babysitters and daycares and at your abuela’s house your whole childhood. I was working. Does that traumatize you?” I was like, “Oh, no.” And so just her putting that little spin on, it was clarifying for me. And really how I reflect on her mothering is that she modeled for me what it is to live a life as a woman. I think April has done that for Noelle to a much more extreme version. But I think there’s something really powerful and beautiful in that. And she has also taken ownership of that act too. As difficult as that act is, there is an ethical reckoning that the mother is doing also. And I don’t know. I mean, look, dad sees it through to the end. He’s the one who gets her the 18th birthday cake and the tiramisu.
Debbie Millman:
And gives her the letter.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
And gives her the letter. Has he ever looked her in the eye and said, “I abandoned you for your first 10 years”? Has he ever done that ethical act? I don’t know. We don’t get his side of the story. So I think April is more than a good mother. I think she’s a powerful mother. And I think Noelle will become a powerful person because of the kind of mother she had.
Debbie Millman:
I want to share another couple of lines from the book. April writes this to Noelle about her leaving. “Leaving you was a kind of death. And in its wake, the world’s beauty was almost unbearable.” And she goes on to state, “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 till age 10, 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.”
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yeah. A little bit in that is my nod to Frankenstein, which is another book I read during this hard time in my life that led to me writing, actually sitting down and writing The White Hot. And in Frankenstein, which I think is absolutely about motherhood, the creature says, the creation says, “Yeah, don’t absolve me, just hear me out.” He’s less interested in the verdict and more advocating for the act of bearing witness, as its own bestowing of humanity, as a humanizing act. And so that’s my little nod, and thank you, and I love you to Frankenstein.
Debbie Millman:
April is never redeemed. We don’t know exactly what happens next. We get a glimpse, but we don’t really know the future. Your book refuses to resolve the question of, is it okay that she did this? And when you were writing, did you want the reader to forgive her or simply to understand her?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
So this ending that really refuses to make a verdict on April, it’s because a question started to coalesce for me as I got to the end of the book, which is, “Will I, Quiara, ever be able to look at my own mom and see her, not as my mom, as the woman she is? That’s it. Not what I need from her, not what I want from her, not what I got from her, not what I didn’t get from her. Would I ever be able to just behold her, who she is? And if I could, how would we grow in different ways together?”
So this started becoming a question for me. Can any of us do that? Can we see our parents and specifically our mothers outside of our need, as individual agents in this world? And how would that inform our relationship with them if we could do that? I became obsessed with this question. And I don’t think that… To me, it’s a question without an answer, but I became so curious about, I think I probably can’t but to strive to feels noble and worthy to me. So this is what happens to me at the end of the book, this telling of, can Noelle ever see April as the woman who wrote that letter? Or will she always, always be stuck and shackled to that it’s the mommy who wrote that letter? Will she ever be free of that narrative? And I think she wants to. I think she really, really wants to be free of that narrative.
Debbie Millman:
The ending of the novel hinges on a single haunting image, Noelle having to look through her own reflection in a window to see an inside another life. How did that image guide the ending?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
I had to rewrite the ending a number of times. I was getting close. I was circling around it. But it wasn’t locking in. But that image was part of every draft. I said, “There’s this window. She’s looking through it. And the way the lighting is and the way the window is dirty, she sees her own face reflected in it. She has to look through her face and past it.” So that really guided the ending. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why she was doing that. And I knew I finally had the right ending when I was like, “Oh, that makes sense. Now I know why she’s looking through her own face.”
There’s a line on the final pages where she says… Actually, this is a third person narrator, that a mother is a life sentence after all. The sense of a mother being a life sentence. And even though it’s third person, it really is told from Noelle’s point of view. And so yes, that sense of looking through our own face. Well, we always see our mothers through our own face. I know if you stare directly into the sun, you go blind. If we look directly at our mothers, will we go blind, or can we see them? Can we see them just once?
Debbie Millman:
I don’t know the answer to that question, and I wish I did. You have described The White Hot as escaping in order to live. Did it change how you think about freedom in your own life?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Yes. Me reckoning with, again, this youthful, annoying, burdensome desire to be liked, to be helpful, to accommodate and care for the people around me, that serves a purpose. And some of those things, I want to hang on to. But I thought I want to do that to myself first now for a little while. That’s where I’m at. I’m 48 years old. Who am I living this life for? Me, getting real and honest with what I want, what I can do, what I can’t do, that, I think, could only be to the benefit of my loved ones. I just think the sense of freedom as being just super real, super real with myself about what am I doing here? What am I doing here and why? That’s where I am right now. That’s my current moment in the journey.
Debbie Millman:
Quiara, the last thing I want to talk to you about is what you might be writing next. In a recent interview, you stated that you never took a fiction workshop or a fiction class. So as you were working on The White Hot, you didn’t know what the rules were, and there was something really wondrous about being in that naive place of creation. Now that you know more the rules, is it impacting how you approach your next project or your next book?
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Well, I’m trying to avoid learning the rules for as long as possible. So the next novel has to be very different. So I’m leaning a little bit more into a humorous tone, into a light touch. My protagonist is a 60-year-old woman, 60-year-old lunch lady. So yeah, I’m avoiding. I know the rules a little bit now about how to write a book like The White Hot, but I don’t know how to write a book that’s different from The White Hot. So this is how I’m keeping myself on my toes.
The thing that is very fun about working in the book form is I feel like my 17-year-old self with all her emotions and all her sacred curiosity and all her horniness and all her rage against the machine, I feel like she’s sitting right beside me because she’s the girl who fell in love with books. She’s the girl who read Allen Ginsberg America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. She’s the girl who read Bitch magazine front to back. She’s the girl who read I am an invisible man, and was really shaped by those bold testimonials about what it is to be in this nation, to be a person in this nation.
And so I feel that I know so much more now, having a lot of life experience, but I’m holding hands with this young and emotionally available version of myself too. And so I’m taking that into the next book. I want to continue on that journey.
Debbie Millman:
Quiara Alegría Hudes, thank you so much for making so much work that matters. Thank you for writing this remarkable book. And thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Quiara Alegría Hudes:
Debbie, it was a real pleasure.
Debbie Millman:
Quiara’s book is titled The White Hot. You could read more about Quiara at quiara.com. This is the 21st year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.