My Broken Language

Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who co-wrote the book for In the Heights, looks back on growing up in a struggling Puerto Rican neighborhood in Philadelphia. As a child she watched from the stairs as her mother, aunts, and cousins danced their resistance in a cramped North Philly kitchen. She admired these women while sensing the stories about the barrio that no one told. Torn between English and Spanish, spoken words and written ones, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars, she struggled to find a voice of her own. Her relatives came to feel like a private pantheon of powerful, orisha-like women, each marked by painful hardships, and she promised to write down their lives. First, though, she had to leave the stairs and join the dance, which meant finding her own language.

The memoir blends her love of music with her family's songs and sets the lessons she learned in North Philadelphia beside those she learned at Yale. It explores home, memory, and belonging through a myth-filled retelling of her youth. At its center is a young woman obsessed with becoming an artist, determined to capture the world she loved in all its wild and fragile beauty.