One World
My Broken Language: A Memoir
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GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK - The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and co-writer of In the Heights tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling Puerto Rican family as a collective muse.
"Quiara Alegría Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories."--Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, New York Public Library, BookPage, BookRiot
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio--even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories--but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.
Weaving together Hudes's love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging--narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780399590061
EAN:
9780399590061
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
336
Authors:
Quiara Alegría Hudes
Publisher:
One World
Published Date: 2022-11-01
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The best I've read in years. It took me a long time to read this, because I didn't want it to ever end.
Funny, deep, and very well written
Oh my! This was so different than any other memoir. It came at me like my own crazy memories. In and out. Mine are mostly English. But if I were raised with another language spoken around me, it might have sounded like this.Cousins and relatives played a big part in this book. Exactly like my memories, just different.If you have a lot of Spanish in your vocabulary, it might be even better. My meager amount barely got me by. At least the author, as she narrated, helped me hear her implications.I picked up this Audible version after hearing about it on a talk show. I had the spare credit, so grabbed it. I'm thinking I will try to find the paperback so I could I can work on the Spanish more.Please read some of the more eloquent reviews. Even if you have no Spanish, there is enough to absorb this beautiful story. I'm glad I own it so I can go back and enjoy it and Quiara's voice and spirit again.
The words on this book fly off the page. The story flows, jerks, plus amazes, amuses, and enlightens us, opening a previously unknown and unsuspected window on one of the exiled communities in the US. How many more of these there surely are!
My favorite part was a description of a play/musical she creates for an independent study at Yale. You can feel the vibrancy of the whole performance. My complaint is that she seems to have originally composed chapters for separate venues, so we hear the same details over and over. She has many points of contrast between her father's Jewish family and her mother's Puerto Rican family, but she frequently goes through the entire list over again, or we'll read a chapter at Yale, and then the next chapter is high school and she's still on tenterhooks about Yale. For a post-doc at Brown, she recounts the interviews she had with famous playwrights in such detail it just sounds like boasting. I did love learning about her mom's spiritual training, with its roots in indigenous Taino gods and West African gods.
