My Broken Language

March 1, 2021
In this joyful and vibrant memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Hudes (Water by the Spoonful and In the Heights) recounts her journey toward artistic mastery. While her language is abundantly fluid and evocative, what the title, Broken Language, evokes is a life lived between two languages and two cultures, that of her Puerto Rican activist mother whose exuberant family is marginalized by the dominant culture of Hudes' white hippie father. Growing up in lively and diverse West Philly with stints at her dad's exclusive and restrained Main Line neighborhood, Hudes grapples with reconciling the privilege she enjoys thanks to her white skin and the stark inequities of cousins struggling with illiteracy and dying from AIDS. Her mostly chronological account covers her childhood in 1970s Philadelphia, adolescence, undergraduate years earning a music degree at Yale, and her post-graduate workshop at Brown where she finally embraces her vocation as a writer. Delightful phrases and vivid images abound, such as: "Every time we hit a bump, I could hear half-melted ice swish in the cooler, as bodega ham and Wonder Bread took a swim."

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Starred review from April 1, 2021

With this riveting memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Hudes tells the story of attempting to find the language that best fits her, along with the languages (English and Spanish) she heard throughout her childhood. Beginning with the distant memory of her parents' split, Hudes evocatively recalls life traveling between her abuela's North Philly kitchen, her mother's West Philly home, and her father's farm in a homogenous Main Line suburb. Recollections of her mother's and grandmother's upbringings in Puerto Rico are rich with detail, as are depictions of aunts, uncles, and cousins who find their way in and around Philadelphia. Hudes is at her best when conveying the challenges of navigating two worlds--not feeling Puerto Rican enough to fully connect with her mother, and always feeling out of place when visiting her Jewish father and his new family. Her writing also thoughtfully details the shame and silence around AIDS, especially as it touched her family. To find solace amid grief and disappointment, Hudes turned to music and literature. The book's powerful final chapters cover her time studying music at Yale and ultimately earning an MFA from Brown. VERDICT Hudes has written a can't-miss love letter, in the form of a memoir, about the people and city that shaped her. A beautifully written story of finding one's own sense of self.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

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Starred review from February 15, 2021
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright presents a tender yet defiant tale about finding strength in one's roots. In this elegant and moving memoir, Hudes begins with her upbringing in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia, examining the complexities involved in negotiating two distinct worlds early on. At first, she fixated on the languages spoken around her and the ways in which their syllables and pronunciations told stories that would become woven into her own. As she grew older, however, her awe morphed into an acute awareness of her difference from other children, and she was embarrassed by her mother's spiritualist practices. "I so wanted to take my dad's side, join his disavowal of any god, his assertion that religion was the root of all evil," she writes. "It would have brought a perverse relief to write off mom's gift as gremlins of brain chemistry, to name some psychological diagnosis." But as members of her family fell ill or became victims of violence, Hudes realized the significance of acknowledging the power of their stories and the importance of maintaining familial bonds and traditions. The text often reads like poetry, but it is also playful, the author toying with the barriers of language, and the narrative is propelled by the urgent notion that community matters in a world designed to push the have-nots further into the margins. It's rewarding to see how, with the help of a loving mother and support network, Hudes derived power from her own culture and found success. She admits that the work is never fully finished. "No matter how far I traveled, how old I grew or how loudly I voiced us, our old silence chased me down, reaffirmed their hook," she writes near the end. If the author's worst fear is to be silent, she can rest assured that this memoir speaks volumes. A beautifully written account of the importance of culture and family in a small but powerful community.

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