The White Hot

Description

The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom–and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment–from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegr?a Hudes.

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest–an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years–an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story–spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny–with delicate lyricism and tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Quiara Alegr?a Hudes
Published: 11/11/2025
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 9780593732335
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 1.00″ H x 8.30″ L x 5.70″ W

About the Author
Quiara Alegr?a Hudes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Water by the Spoonful and the musical In the Heights, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and which she adapted for the screen. Her memoir, My Broken Language, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cut, The Nation, and American Theater Magazine. She is co-founder with her cousin Sean of the prison writing program Emancipated Stories.