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- [00:10]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Chiara Alegria Giudes is the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright for Water by the Spoonful. She wrote the book for the Tony nominated In the Heights and a memoir called My Broken Language. Now Whoris can add another title to her resume. Novelist. The book the White Hot follows a young mother, April Soto, who angrily storms out of her home one night. This impulsive departure turns into a years long journey of self discovery. But left behind in April's wake is her 10 year old daughter Noelle. She is bright but troubled. The book is written in the form of a candid letter opened that April pens Noel and she can't open it until her 18th birthday. Kirkus calls it, quote, a profound journey to the soul. The novel is out tomorrow. We are lucky to have Kiara here in studio with us today. Welcome to the show.
- [01:05]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
All right, here we go.
- [01:06]
Alison Stewart
And a note. I want to point out that the White Hot will have a reading at Joe's Pub on November 24th.
- [01:12]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Yes.
- [01:13]
Alison Stewart
Do you want to read the first page of the novel for us?
- [01:15]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
I would love to. So this is how it all begins. Noelle received the envelope eight years after her mother's disappearance. She got home from school and found it propped on the counter, oversized 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. Noel Soto. It wasn't the handwriting that dinged memory's bell so much as the pen's feral indentations. No sender was named above the return address. But Noel 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 September's, 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. Did that mean that 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. And so, with rumbling heart and saliva, pasting tongue to teeth, Noel 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 Noel 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. Dear Noel.
- [03:27]
Alison Stewart
And now the rest of the book. It's interesting. A great part of the book is written in this epistolary form. Why did you choose this story, letter writing to tell the story?
- [03:39]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
It's so direct, it's. I could feel this character, April Soto, she's the kind of female anti hero I always wanted to write. I always wanted to be, to be perfectly honest, I could feel her whispering in my ear. She just felt that close to me. And so that letter writing form, most of the book is this letter directly to her daughter. And it puts the reader in the position of feeling her voice that close, making it feel that personal, which can be delightful at times and quite uncomfortable at other times.
- [04:14]
Interviewer/Host 2
How would you describe April?
- [04:17]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
So April is a bright 26 year old young woman who lives in Philadelphia in a four generation household. She has never left Philly. She lives a very small life, but she's got an incredibly big intellect and we find her at a precipice when she wants to live a big life. And not only that, she never really got to experience what being a teenager was like because she had a daughter when she was 16 and she realizes my daughter is going to inherit this small life too. So she feels herself at a precipice and she feels her daughter about to kind of start to become a young woman and take on these kind of bad habits that she's grown up with. So April has some big decisions to make about what kind of life she's gonna as a woman and what kind of womanhood she's going to model for her daughter.
- [05:13]
Interviewer/Host 2
What bad habits does she want her daughter to avoid?
- [05:16]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Okay, so there is this scene early on that involves sweeping. And this is four generations of females in this household, not a man in sight. And they're having an argument around the dinner table. April used to get into trouble at school. She used to fight. She would get sent to the principal's office. She would also get in trouble for being too smart to be honest. And that would get her sent to the principal's office too, While her daughter's 10 is, is in the same position. So they're around the dinner table at night, they're fighting over the latest, you know, suspension at school. And plates get thrown. And here goes abuela, she goes to grab the broom, she's trying to sweep up cooked rice off the ground, which you know, is the comic attempt because you it just globs and gloms onto the broom. And April sees this and realizes, for generations the women in my family have been sweeping their desires, their truths, their loves, their dreams under the rug. I'm sweeping myself under the rug. I don't want that. She makes a vow to herself, I'm not gonna sweep myself under the rug anymore. So that's the habit she doesn't want her daughter to inherit. And she's got lots of ways to do it. She gets in fight, she puts on her noise canceling headphones and listens to nature sounds. She basically is just tamping down all of her life force to make it through the day.
- [06:42]
Interviewer/Host 2
And how would you describe Noel?
- [06:44]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Noelle is also brilliant. She's a drawer. And another thing that precipitates this fight around the dinner table is that she's done a drawing for her fourth grade class about her family home. And it, it's kind of a critical drawing of it's like slightly passive aggressive, but like brilliant. Young Artist edition. So she sees mom, how you're living, it's not cool. And she sees grandma Abuela, how you guys are living, it's not cool. And she shows that in drawing form. And so she's hungry for a bigger life too, just like her mom. And neither of them knows how to get it and they're gonn to stumble upon it. In this book, in this journey, was.
- [07:36]
Interviewer/Host 2
The letter writing form always your choice or did you start out in a different way? Sometimes novels start off as a short story or a poem. Was it always this, this letter?
- [07:47]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
It wasn't. You know, I've been a playwright for 20 years and that's my default form. And so I started it as a script. And it started with a dinner table, the dinner table scene, the fight around the dinner table. And then it became something much more personal. There's a moment of spirit, spiritual revelation. So this book is inspired by a book I read in high school, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, which is basically for those who don't know it.
- [08:13]
Interviewer/Host 2
I'm laughing because you're in the book. That plays a significant role in the book.
- [08:17]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
It does, it does. So you know, it's not autobiographical, but she reads it when April reads it when she's in high school. I also read it in high school and it's the Buddha story, fictionalized and in. And so I kind of followed that. I was jealous of Siddhartha because he left a newborn child behind. He left his wife, he left his family, and he went and found God by the river. And I'm like, well, I'm talking about me, Kiara, in my real life. Like, my mom didn't get to stop doing the dishes and leave and go find God. You know, go find enlightenment. Fill in the blank. Anyway, there's. I wanted April to do that. I wanted her to grab her freedom and go and find what she could find out in the larger world. And there's a scene where she finds the tiniest peak, the tiniest glimpse of enlightenment by the Schuylkill river in Philadelphia. And that's enlightenment that's hard to pull off on a stage. I said, no, I need to hear that from inside her, not in dialogue. And so it became this kind of personal letter.
- [09:21]
Interviewer/Host 2
And you called her an antihero, as opposed to the protagonist. Why did you call her the antihero?
- [09:29]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
You know, I have been reading and grappling with and grateful for and deeply inspired by Elena Ferrante, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid. And they're writing these women whose lives are experiments in freedom, and it comes at a cost. It's not like, oh, freedom's some fun thing. No. They become scorned by their communities, outcasts. There are female pariahs, but they're fumbling towards and fighting for a sense of self possession. And that is electric to me. And it's alive, and it's aspirational, but it does turn them into antiheroes. And so, April. I'm throwing my hat in the ring. I wanted to contribute to that conversation. April leaves her daughter. She leaves her daughter when her daughter's 10 years old. And it puts a question in the reader's lap, which is, is it okay that she did that?
- [10:24]
Interviewer/Host 2
Something worse might have stayed, might have happened if she stayed.
- [10:27]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Yes, this is true. It wasn't. It wasn't a healthy environment, but it's. It's a tough choice.
- [10:34]
Alison Stewart
I'm speaking with author and playwright Kiara Alegria Judes. She's here to talk about her new debut novel, the White Hot, which is Publishing on November 11th. What is the White Hotel?
- [10:47]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
So the white hot is her fury. She got in fights when she was a kid. She feels so stressed out, so frustrated, so angry, she doesn't even know why. And she spends a lot of her day just trying to put up, put that, tamp that down, put a mask on it, keep it under wraps. She calls it her armor and her undoing. That's how she refers to it in the book. It's her Armor because she lived a tough life. The women in her family have lived tough lives. They've had to protect themselves emotionally to the point that they're almost disassociated. And it's that fury that she gets her to run. She gets up from that dinner table and she goes. She gets a ticket out of town. She's never left Philly. This is all new to her. So in some ways, the fury that she feels inside her, it's caused a lot of pain, it's caused a lot of frustration, but it's also her ticket to self actualization and freedom.
- [11:47]
Alison Stewart
What causes the white hot to come to show up and what causes it to leave?
- [11:55]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
You know, she describes that it's almost like an electricity taking over her. It's like it looks like milk is poured in her eyes. It looks like lightning is in her eyes. She just sees the world white. And sometimes she doesn't know. She's so disconnected from herself, she doesn't even know why. And of course she knows in the back of her head. And she fesses up to her daughter Noel. By the end of the book, she says, I don't want to sweep myself under the rug anymore. This is what happened to us. There is trauma in their history. She touches on it briefly but honestly. And you know, that trauma kind of comes up at ugly and unexpected moments that are not convenient for her life as a young working mother. It comes on like a tsunami and then it leaves and she feels depleted. She's ashamed for having fought. She's embarrassed at how she behaved. She wants to end this cycle.
- [12:53]
Interviewer/Host 2
I wanted to ask you about her mantra that she uses, dead inside. What does that do for her?
- [13:01]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Right. So when we, when we meet her, she's. Her job is basically data entry. So she's tabulating receipts and she spends the whole day just looking at receipts and entering the numbers. And it's numbing. She likes it because there's a numbing component to that work. When, when things heat up at home, she puts on her noise canceling headphones. She listens to nature sounds and she says repeats on, on loop inside her mind. Dead inside, dead inside, dead inside. She's afraid to feel. She's afraid to feel because they have a history of feeling really darn bad. But actually like when she hits the road and runs. In this book, she also starts to feel really good too. So she wants to take the good with the bad. She learns to engage her feelings dead on. And she drops that mantra dead inside real quick. In fact, there's A scene where she hikes into the woods, and she's wearing her casual work clothes from the day. She's wearing gladiator sandals and skinny jeans and a sequin top. And she's never been in the woods before. And she starts getting blisters. I mean, she's just not prepared for this hike at all. And she remember, and her feet are killing her with these blisters. And she remembers that earlier that day, her mantra had been dead inside. And she says, you know what? I want a new mantra for this, to deal with this blister pain. And so her new mantra, as she's walking through the woods, she's telling herself, skin heals. Skin heals. And so even the mantra starts to evolve.
- [14:31]
Interviewer/Host 2
Our main character, April, she goes to the bus station and she asks for a ticket to the furthest destination, right?
- [14:38]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Yes.
- [14:40]
Interviewer/Host 2
But her letter focuses on the first 10 days of her disappearance.
- [14:44]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Yes.
- [14:45]
Interviewer/Host 2
Why did you pick the first 10 days?
- [14:48]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Well, when she gets up and rolls and she's like, I gotta get away from this dinner table. I don't wanna see my abuela with the broom. I gotta get out of here. She's just thinking she's taken a walk to blow Offstein for an hour. But, whoa, why are my feet walking towards the Greyhound bus station? Whoa. Why am I asking for a ticket far away? She's kind of taking it one day at a time. And it's over the course of these 10 days that she almost has the youth, the girlhood, the adolescence she never got. It all happens late in her 20s, and it happens quick. She reads her first feminist book. She hears jazz for the first time. She's embarrassed and angry that she never heard jazz in her life. She takes her first walk in the woods. She sees her first shooting star. Things that are like normal tent poles for many people's childhood, she never got them. So it's those 10 days when she kind of becomes a woman. Not just any woman, she becomes the woman she chooses to be. From there on out, it's, you know, we don't know what happens after that.
- [15:57]
Interviewer/Host 2
Why isn't she scared of this outside environment that she's never been in before? How is she able to manage it?
- [16:04]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
She is scared. And it's not the kumbaya nature that she experiences in Ohio. Pyle State Park. You know, she faces bears. She faces, where do I drink clean water from? She gets, you know, cut up by some thorns. At one point, there's a storm that comes through, which is very scary. But something happens in the woods. Where it's like she hasn't put on deodorant in a few days and she starts to kind of smell and she's like realizes she doesn't even know what her natural state is. She's so removed from herself. I think when she, when she goes into those woods at first she's almost thinking like it's almost like some sort of like self harm activity. Like I'm just going to go disappear, no one's ever going to be able to find me, you know. But actually what it becomes is that she starts connecting with a kind of native nature to her, with her animal self for the, you know, for the scary parts and also for the beautiful parts.
- [17:03]
Interviewer/Host 2
As you've mentioned, you've written, you've written playwright, you are a playwright, you've written plays, you've written musicals. What was different about writing a novel?
- [17:13]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
I absolutely loved this form so much and what I loved most about it is that there's no, this is not autofiction. This is not based on someone. I did not go through these experiences. And it's that kind of thing where none of nothing in there is a fact, but all of it is really true. I could just pour my heart and soul into April. I actually think that I played this little game with myself as she went through another step in the story. I'd say, okay, what would Kiara do here? April's gonna do the opposite. I got to live a different kind of womanhood through April. And so I loved that form of fiction and how close and personal I could make it.
- [17:57]
Alison Stewart
The name of the book is the White Hot. It comes out tomorrow. We've been speaking with its author, Chiara Alegria Giudes. Thank you for coming to the studio. We really appreciate it.
- [18:08]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
A real pleasure.
- [18:10]
Alison Stewart
Coming up on tomorrow's show, we'll talk about films inspired by the real world. Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza talks about the film Warfare, which is based on his own experiences as a Navy seal. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you and I will meet you back here next time.
- [18:33]
Walmart Ad Speaker
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- [18:40]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
What about toys?
- [18:41]
Alison Stewart
Do they have brands kids have been wanting all year? Yep.
- [18:44]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
Barbie, Tonys and Lego. Gifts that will make them all cheer.
- [18:47]
Alison Stewart
Do you mean they have all the brands I adore?
- [18:50]
Kiara Alegria Giudes
They have Nintendo, Nespresso, Apple and more. What a bad.
- [18:54]
Walmart Ad Speaker
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- [19:03]
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