SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
On the day of her 18th birthday, a girl named Noelle comes home from school and finds a letter waiting for. She recognizes the handwriting immediately. It's from her mother, who had walked out of Noelle's life a decade before. In it, Noelle finds the answer to a question she's never stopped asking - where did her mother go and why? This is the premise of Quiara Alegria Hudes' debut novel, "The White Hot." Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who was behind works like "In The Heights" and "Water By The Spoonful." NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento recently caught up with her in New York City.
ISABELLA GOMEZ SARMIENTO, BYLINE: It's a crisp fall morning in Washington Heights, when I meet Quiara Alegria Hudes at a tall brick building near the Hudson River.
QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES: This is my writing studio. It's one floor above where I live.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: There's a couch, a piano and a giant pinboard where Hudes spent years organizing notes for "The White Hot." The idea for the novel came to her over a decade ago while she was listening to Alanis Morissette's "Jagged Little Pill."
HUDES: The thing about that album is she's this young woman. She's got all this anger. She's got all this rage.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I REALLY WANT")
ALANIS MORISSETTE: (Singing) And all I really want is some patience, a way to calm the angry voice.
HUDES: But she's also playful, and she's also curious and smart and spiritual. And I loved that kind of mess of big emotions that she had.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL I REALLY WANT")
MORISSETTE: (Vocalizing).
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: This was the inspiration for April Soto, the missing mother and antihero of 'The White Hot." At 26, April lives with her mother, grandmother and Noelle, who is the result of a high school pregnancy. April's barely holding it together. One day, the Soto women are sitting down to dinner, and an argument breaks out. Plates get smashed. Over the yelling, April's abuela tries to sweep up the globs of rice and beans that have fallen on the ground. It triggers something in April.
HUDES: She has this vision. Oh, my God. The women in this family have been sweeping their truths, their traumas, their sorrows, their brilliance under the rug for generations. This broom becomes this kind of gateway into, I've got to break this cycle.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: April leaves. She walks out on her mother, on her grandmother and on Noelle. Here's Hudes reading from the letter April leaves for her daughter.
HUDES: (Reading) My anger had launched a voyage, and voyages were my birthright. 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 towards places you're not meant to go.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: April wanders searching for meaning. While communing with nature, she's reminded of "Siddhartha," the Hermann Hesse novel about a man's quest for self-discovery. Like April, Hudes says she was fascinated by that book when she first read it. But she was also struck by the notion that it's a man who has the freedom to leave responsibility behind for the sake of an inner journey.
HUDES: My mom was a very spiritual woman, but she had to find God, honestly, while doing the dishes, OK? Like, I wish my abuela could just take off and be free of all the caretaking she does.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: So Hudes gave April Soto that freedom. On her search, she finds caves, waterfalls and jazz.
HUDES: She hears the rage in Charles Mingus' bass playing. She hears this kind of electric life force.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLES MINGUS' "TRACK A-SOLO DANCER (STOP! LOOK! AND LISTEN. SINNER BY JIM WHITNEY!)")
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: She wishes she'd had the chance earlier to channel her own energy - what she calls "The White Hot" - to figure out who she really is.
HUDES: She's been a woman in service of others her whole life. And now she's something different. She has to be in service of herself 'cause she has to stay alive, and she's really never served herself in her life.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: April chooses herself over her responsibility to her daughter.
HUDES: It puts the reader in the position of, can I forgive Mom? Here she is explaining, telling me about this amazing spiritual quest, this amazing adventure she had at the cost of me.
GOMEZ SARMIENTO: For Quiara Alegria Hudes, that's the big question.
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, NPR News, New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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