Fresh Air - Best Of: Writers Rachel Eliza Griffiths & Quiara Alegría Hudes

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

When writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Salman Rushdie in 2021, she expected her wedding  day to be joyful. But the joy was invaded by tragedy, when she got the news her best friend had died. Eleven months later, Rushdie was stabbed and nearly killed onstage. Griffiths describes that year in her new memoir, ‘The Flower Bearers.'Also, we hear from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, writer of ‘In the Heights,’ ‘Water by the Spoonful,’ and the memoir ‘My Broken Language.’  Her new novel, ‘The White Hot,’ tells the story of a young mother who buys a one-way bus ticket and leaves her 10 year-old daughter behind. Plus, film critic Justin Chang reviews ‘Sound of Falling,’ which is shortlisted for an Oscar for Best International Feature.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week on Consider This, the bigger story behind President Trump's trip to the world economic form in Davos, how he's rewriting the rules of the economy, and how the rest of the world is coming to terms with a global order not led by the United States. Listen every afternoon to consider this on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. When writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths married Salman Rushdie in 2021, she expected her wedding day to be joyful, but the joy was invaded by tragedy, when her best friend never showed up because she suddenly died. 11 months later, Salman Rushdie was stabbed and nearly killed on stage.

Griffiths describes that year in her new memoir, The Flower Bearers. Also, we hear from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Kiara Alagria, Huities, writer of In the Heights, Water by the Spoonful, and the memoir My Broken Language. Her new novel, The White Hot, tells the story of a young mother who buys a one-way bus ticket and leaves her 10-year-old daughter behind. Plus, film critic Justin Chang reviews Sound of Falling, which is shortlisted for an Oscar for Best International Feature. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. You can send, spend, and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps.

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AI agents grounded in your data and build for your goals. On the TED Radio Hour, if you won the lottery, your life would be amazing, right? So I think everyone's got a vision of what it's like to win the lottery in their head when they're playing. The reality, of course, is very different. Ideas about making the most of what you've got and finding agency. Listen to the TED Radio Hour on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Terry has our first interview. Here she is. The day that writer Rachel Eliza Griffith, married writer Salman Rushdie,

was expected to be one of the best, perhaps the best day of her life. But her dearest friend Aisha, who was set to speak at the wedding, never arrived. because she suddenly, shockingly, died. That triggered Griffith's dissociative identity disorder. She'll explain what that means a little later. It was only 11 months after the wedding that Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while being interviewed on stage at the Chautauqua Festival near Buffalo, New York. Griffith was home in New York City at the time and had to figure out how to get to her husband,

not knowing whether she'd find him still alive, what their future would be, what her. her future would be. When she got to the ICU, he was hanging on to his life. His face was so disfigured from the wounds, the stab that blinded him, and the swelling that she refused to allow him to look in a mirror. Griffith's new memoir, The Flower Bearers, covers this period, as well as her childhood, which pretty much ended when she was 11 or 12, and her mother was diagnosed with kidney disease. She also writes about her relationship with Aisha and how they initially connected over being black female poets, trying to find their voices as writers and a place in the literary world. Rachel Eliza Griffith is also the author of the novel Promise and several poetry collections,

including Seeing the Body. Rachel Eliza Griffith, welcome to Fresh Air. I really like your book a lot. Thank you so much, Terry. And I'm going to call you Eli. from here on in because that's how you prefer to be called. So let's start with your wedding day, which you describe as both the best and worst day of your life, best because you were getting married to a man you really loved and who loved you too, and worst because of your dearest friend's disappearance and death. How far were you into the wedding when you found out that she was dead? I did not find out, and I remember it quite clearly, until just after the formal wedding portraits had been done. And so I was in this wonderful state of having just gotten married and this kind of golden light at the end of a September day.

And I started to notice that there just seemed to be a shadow on things. And the people, my loved ones who were there, their voices and manners had changed. And I'm there in my wedding dress. I've just gotten married. in something, this kind of storm or coldness kind of swept over things. And I wanted to go back to my hotel suite. My phone was missing. I wanted to check on my friend to see if she was okay. I'd been told she'd had COVID, and that was why she wasn't coming. Later on, of course, Terry, I realized that my friends and family were just all working really hard to protect myself and my

husband and that joy on that day. But the minute I got back to the hotel in an effort to locate my phone, I suddenly was able to see messages that then that's how I learned about what had happened. You have dissociative identity disorder and that kind of kicked in on your wedding day. Could you describe what that is, what the disorder is? So dissociative identity disorder, some people call it DID. It's a kind of new term to describe a diagnosis of, you know, severe dissociation. Some people have more severe forms of it. I would put myself on a more kind of highly functional scale. DID usually comes into play after experiences of severe childhood trauma. And I have learned, and researched and tried to educate myself to help myself live with this diagnosis. What happened on my wedding day, I think with my DID is that the level of dissociation that I experienced that day matches the kind of intense trauma and shock that my body went into, which means even now that many

parts of my wedding day are blacked out in my memory and are not available to me. Every now and then, I might get a glimpse or if I'm triggered, I will see some aspect of myself or that day. But it's very hard for me even to look at photographs or anything from my wedding day and feel connected to it in the way that I'm sitting here having this conversation with you. And that is also a kind of grief. What does this association mean? This is a kind of word as a writer. I can ask 10 people what it means and they'll all say something different.

For me, I feel that it's a part of my mind and my body that attempts to protect and cope in moments where I feel, you know, flight or fight and I'm trying to get away from something often externally, or it can be in memory that might cause me a pain or a kind of mental assault that I will not be able to withstand. And so I've learned to see my dissociative identity disorder as a protector. I've befriended it. I've learned so much about it so that I don't feel like I'm out of control or I don't know what's happening. But just to be more specific, you actually have alter egos that kick in, like versions of yourself at different ages. Could you just describe that a little bit so we understand a little bit better what you've got to? go through? Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things I write about is how, if you picture maybe, you know, the same version of yourself, you know, in a car and there are different people driving it at different times,

but you're all in the same car and you're all the same. So it's connected to me, ultimately. It's just that it kind of is a container or a space that is very explicitly attached to often a memory or a kind of just a state of being is what I would describe it. So there are moments when I'm in my day. For example, I'll think of myself, you know, my altar as an artist is connected to my altar who is a young child and my altar who in my 20s as a young woman struggling to be an artist and becoming, you know, the person I'm still becoming, that's a different set of memories and a different kind of character. But they all kind of visit me.

I have a future altar who is a really lovely kind of bold, dazzling, older woman. And her name is June. And so she helps me not sweat the small stuff. And she has a lot of humor and style and a chic. And she takes care of me. Let's get back to your wedding day. Did your altars show up that day? I don't really remember.

I have to say, I know there was a moment literally where I felt I was looking down at this woman who was this gorgeous bride and the agony and anguish in her body. She was screaming. She was, people were holding her down so she wouldn't hurt herself. And then I just left. And I think that was all that was available. to try to prevent myself from witnessing such pain and to see myself surrounded by such love, but also the pain of it,

I will never have closure over that. And that's okay. I can accept that now because I've done so much work to comprehend all the different things that were happening on that day. I interviewed your husband, Selman Rushdie, after his memoir, Knife was published, and Knife is about the knife attack on him when he was being interviewed at the Chautauqua Festival

in Western Upstate New York. And in that book, he describes the wedding day briefly, and he describes it as a day of beautiful weather, a day of joy. He doesn't mention the day. the death of your friend Aisha and the crisis mode that you were in. And I'm wondering if you read the book before publication and what you thought of that omission.

I read different parts of the memoir as Salman was writing it. Salman and I had a discussion about the writing in Knife about the wedding day. And he was very clear that this was my story to tell. as far as what happened on the wedding day. And I think in the arc of knife, having suddenly a detour to describe a very traumatizing wedding day would have changed the lens for the arc of knife and what knife was focusing on.

You know, unfortunately, to have these two events for me happen within months of each other was something that drove me to write my memoir. But he and I agreed that I would spend my energy and my attention and my focus on the wedding day because Sleman didn't have access to a 17-year friendship and sisterhood with my dear friend. There was so much more dimension and nuance in the day that wouldn't have fit inside the space of knife. And so that was a decision, Terry, that we made together as right. but also as husband and wife, that that would be a space for me to go back to when I felt strong enough and kind of fluent enough to write about it or to think about it and think about what mattered most that day to me.

So, you know, he helped you through that crisis after Ayesha died. And it sounds like you were and are really deeply in love. But as you said, 11 months after your wife, he was stabbed multiple times, by a man fulfilling the fatwa, a religious decree issued by Iran's Ayatollah, calling for Salman's death because of his novel satanic verses, which the Ayatollah considered blasphemous. It's a miracle your husband survived. And he believed that the threat of the fatwa was over. And I don't think he had constant protection anymore. Did you think that too, that this was no longer anything that the two of you needed to worry about? I truly thought it was a past chapter of his life. I truly did.

We were together for four years. I think we married him four years after meeting. And nothing in our day-to-day life or in our travels and our journeys or anything seemed to suggest any kind of imminent threat or distant threat or anything. And so there was no anticipation. There was no weariness. There was no, this is this kind of specter or shadow hanging over our lives. We were really enjoying each other and we still are. But this was not something that was on our radar at all. We're listening to Terry Gross's conversation with Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Her new memoir is called The Flower Bearers. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley and this is Fresh Air Week.

Can you describe how you found out about the knifing? It was August 12th. It was a Friday. Again, it was this kind of beautiful summer morning. I was at home with my dog and some books and some coffee and just kind of having a quiet morning by myself. And a dear friend phoned me and said, you know, where are you? And I said, oh, I'm home. And she and I have been trying to make plans to see each other. So when she called that early, I thought, oh, she's calling me to make plans. But her voice immediately was very, very different. And so she said, you know, I'm coming over right now. Someone's been hurt. I'll be right there. And I just didn't know what that meant. I thought he was up at Chautauqua doing an event. He's done a lot of events since I've known. him and so I just really didn't understand. But the way her voice sounded, I knew it was really

terrible. And so I kind of sprang up and was running around the house trying to grab clothes. And I fell down the steps and hurt myself really badly. And she showed up. And, you know, the rest of the day became a nightmare. And that was how it was just an ordinary morning. and that is kind of sometimes the thing that can shock you. And that day remains a mark of a different life that opened up immediately for me. When you fell down the stairs, did you feel like less competent and less able to hold things together? I mean, falling down the stairs is pretty horrible. But to do that as you really have to rise to the occasion,

and know what to do. You had to like charter a private plane so you could get there as soon as possible. It's like an eight-hour drive. And you had to show up strong. You had to be capable. Did it shake your confidence when you fell? I think falling down the stairs was one of the best things that could have happened to me. And here's why. When I got up and realized I hadn't broken my neck or broken a bone, I just really was like, that's the last time you fall down. You cannot risk. your safety, you cannot be running around with your head off your shoulders. You need to focus now. It was very clarifying because literally in seconds I really had no control of my body, my emotions. I was just kind of in free fall. And when I got to the bottom of this flight of stairs, I just thought, Rachel Eliza, stand up, get up, get focused here. You don't have time to follow all. down the stairs and be a wreck and be crying in a mess. Like, you've got to bear down now.

And so when I look back at that moment, you know, in that moment, I actually really did feel like, hey, that's it. You're done with falling down. You have to go forward and get through this day and you don't know what's coming, but you've got to be present in every single moment. You've got to pay attention now where you put each foot down and walk. And that's what happened, you know. for me after taking a really, really violent tumble down the stairs.

He describes you during this period when he was really badly injured. It's a miracle he survived. And then as he slowly started to heal, he describes U.S. as rock overseeing his care. Everything was filtered through you. You were the one in contact with his medical team, the police, the FBI, security. It all went through you. you write about your feelings of helplessness, paranoia, hypervigilance. What were you experiencing during that period when he saw you as his rock?

I think there was a great deal of dissonance for me. When I was caring for someone and doing all of these things, I didn't cry in the hospital room because I just didn't think that would be helpful. And really, I didn't have the energy. I had to conserve energy for all of these different balls. that were all in the air. And when you've just married someone and now you're responsible for their survival, you're part of being involved in life or death situation. You don't really have time to tally up how strong you are, how brave you are, her courageous you are. You have to keep

going. And I was in survivor mode. So I would have very vulnerable moments. I cried in a lot of corners and stairwells and yeah, I threw up a lot. I was really sick. My whole body was in shock. And at the same time, I don't know how to explain it. I don't know if it's innate or learned. But when there is a lot of pressure and things are kind of going to hell, I will focus and bear down. To go in such a short amount of time from bride to caregiver, what were some of your fears as he slowly started to heal because I think in situations like this both people can be really profoundly changed by the experience of trauma and I mean did you ever question whether you'd still both be in love with each other when the healing was done you know to the extent that you can heal

one one eye as it's blinded by the knife and you know I think three fingers or numb forever. And I mean, there was a lot of permanent damage that was done that you don't heal from. I never questioned the love. I think what has been more debilitating are the physical consequences of the violence that was done to him and in a way to me as well. I think it's hard to watch the love of your life struggle with blindness, with impaired mobility, to feel exhausted, but I'm also trying to really look at what is there. You know, the knife didn't take

away the mind inside of my husband. It has not taken away his curiosity. It has not taken away how romantic he is and how he loves to plan date nights for us and, you know, watching movies and traveling and trying to spend as much quality time together as we can. I think this experience makes you think about time. And I think because I am married to someone who is much older than me, there is a sense of time, time passing, being present, and really filling the time up with love. And there are moments when we are very human with each other, like any other marriage. But we really laugh a lot and we really try to support each other. I think there's something that happens. And, you know, you were talking about care.

and caregiving, you know, caregivers and caretakers can have as much trauma as the person, as the loved one that they are caring for. It's just a different iteration. But there's a kind of indescribable bridge and bond we have, having survived such an experience that has reinforced the most wondrous and beautiful and, you know, incandescent spaces of this marriage. And this friendship, this friendship is beautiful. And I'm grateful for it. And that gives me a lot of strength and courage to just keep going. You just have to keep going.

Eliza, it's just been great to talk with you. Thank you so much for sharing so much. Your book is great. So really happy to be able to talk about it with you. Terry, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. Rachel Eliza Griffith's new memoir is called The Flower Bearers. She spoke with Terry Gross.

One of the best movies, our film critic Justin Chang saw in 2025, opens in U.S. theaters this week. It's a German film called Sound of Falling, and it won a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and has been shortlisted for an Oscar for Best International Features. It was directed by Masha Shalensky, and it follows the experiences of four generations of women living in the same rural stretch of northern Germany. Here's Justin's review. I wouldn't call the mesmerizing German drama Sound of Falling, a horror film, exactly, but it does feature one of the greatest haunted houses that I've ever seen. The setting is a remote farmstead in northern Germany, and while there are no jump scares or bumps in the night, the director, Masha Shalinski, is a master at conjuring ghostly atmosphere.

Her camera, wielded by the brilliant cinematographer Fabian Gumpur, has the eerie ability to slip the bonds of time and space, and perhaps even of life and death. The movie follows several different characters, most of them girls and young women, who have lived on this farm over the course of a century. A lot of mysteries and secrets have accumulated over the time. that time, and Shilinsky, working with the co-writer Louise Peter, is determined to bring

them into the open. Sound of Falling has many intricate stories to tell, and an unusual means of telling them. The movie jumps around in time convulsively, to the point where you often wonder not just where you are, but when you are. Yet the disorientation isn't off-putting. It's thrilling. Watching this film is like getting lost in a labyrinth. and gradually feeling your way out. For the sake of clarity, I'll introduce the main characters in chronological order, even though the film doesn't.

First, we get to know a solemn young girl named Alma, who's growing up in the early 1900s, shortly before World War I. Alma may be too young to fully understand what's going on, but she's smart enough to know that disturbing things are afoot, like the mysterious accident that causes her older brother, Fritz, to lose part of his leg, which keeps him from having to fight. Later in the 1940s, we'll meet Alma and Fritz's niece, Erica, a curious, mischievous teenager,

whose hard-scrabble life is cut short amid the horrors of World War II. In time, we'll meet Erica's niece, Angelica, a dark-haired teenager who's growing up in the 1980s, in what is now the German Democratic Republic. But Sound of Falling doesn't really delve into the politics of East and West Germany. Although history is always present, the movie wears that history lightly. Shilinsky isn't interested in broad brushstrokes, as a more traditional European period filmmaker might be. She's after an intimate, fine-grained exploration of what it was like for women to grow up during times of great unrest,

or even times of relative peace, as a young girl named Lenka experiences when her family moves into the farmstead in the 2020s. But even during moments of seeming stability, tragedy is seldom far away. As the film darts from one thread to the next, it shows us how people living in entirely different eras are nonetheless bound by common experiences.

Patriarchal oppression and sexual abuse are depressing constants. In one chilling passage during the 1910s, young Alma alludes to the forced sterilization of women's servants, a common practice to make them safe for the men. About seven decades later, Angelica fends off the advances of a creepy uncle, even as she undergoes her own sexual awakening. Nearly all the characters dream of escaping or running away.

Some experience suicidal ideation, and Shilinsky plugs us right into their dark fantasies of death, whether by getting run over by farming equipment or drowning in a nearby river. These women, for all their intense feelings of isolation and despair, are not as alone as they think. More than once, the 2015 song, Stranger, by the Swedish artist Anavan Hausfulf, plays on the soundtrack, forming a hypnotic musical bridge between different characters and eras. The film's title, Sound of Falling, is one of its many mysteries. It reminded me of that old philosophical riddle

about a tree falling in the forest, and no one being around to hear it. The similarly ambiguous German title, Indy Zonashawain, translates as, into the sun. With both titles, I think, the film is trying to activate our senses, as the best movies do, and to get us to think about all the things that can escape our senses, all the strange, specific, yet utterly recognizable experiences that we might not notice if we don't look or listen more closely. Sound of Falling is only Masha Shalinski's second feature,

and it shows the kind of deep human curiosity and exhilarated. formal mastery that makes me excited to see what she does next. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. Coming up, we hear from Kiara Alagria Houdies. She collaborated with Lynn Manuel Miranda on the musical In The Heights in the animated film Vivo. In her debut novel, The White Hot, a mother abandons her 10-year-old daughter, then writes a letter to explain. This is Fresh Air Weekend. My guest today is Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Kiara Alagria Houdies, writer of In the Heights, Water by the Spoonful, and the Memoir My Broken Language.

She recently published her first novel, The White Hot, and it opens in a locked bathroom. The bathroom is the only place April Soto can escape her small chaotic life. She's 26 years old and lives in a Philadelphia row house with her mother, grandmother, and her mother, and her mother. her 10-year-old daughter Noel. She's the book's anti-hero, volatile, quick to anger, driven by a heat she calls the white-hot. The bathroom is where she goes to cool down or disappear, until one day April visits her daughter, Noelle's school, and sees an art project, a drawing of their home. And there April is locked in the bathroom. The hiding place she believed was private had actually never been a secret at all. Her daughter had been watching the whole time.

This realization hits hard, sparking an urgent need to run, and so April buys a one-way bus ticket to the farthest place she can find. The White Hat unfolds as a letter, a mother writing to the daughter she left behind, trying to explain the choice that changed both of their lives. Huties won the Pulitzer Prize for Water by the Spoonful, which explored addiction and trauma in a Puerto Rican American family. She also wrote the book, In The Heights, and adapted it for the screen. And her memoir, My Broken Language, traced her multi-generational upbringing in Philadelphia, a world she explores in the White Hot.

Kiyara, welcome to fresh air. Thanks. I'm excited to talk. There are very few acts we judge more harshly than a mother who leaves her child, who abandons her child. And as I'm reading the book, I was wondering how you let go of that judgment to bring life into April if you ever even held that judgment to begin with. You know, the book came out a few months ago. And the more time and distance I am separated from its active writing, the more I'm reflecting on it. And I almost started to cry when you asked the question because it makes me emotional that April's, is this anti-hero. She's done the unthinkable. She's left her child. And we know that from the

beginning. It's not a spoiler. But what the book doesn't detail as much because it's just a given is that she didn't leave her child. She stayed with her child. When she was pregnant as a high schooler, as a teenager, the dad saw that and wanted no part of it. And he took off. So she actually made she's the one that made the decision to stay. And I wonder if even me writing the story of her leaving and not the story of her staying did her a slight disservice. But I don't think so. I think that she has this message to give to her estranged daughter,

who she left when she was 10 years old, and she wants this daughter to know, look, I stayed for 10 years, but here's what it's like to be a woman who takes her life into her own hands and who has agency. And maybe I waited too long to learn these lessons. Maybe you can learn these lessons a little bit sooner. You know, April, I mean, she's very clear.

She has this understanding that her words can't really justify why she left, but the words really is all that she has. And so she writes her daughter this letter, as you said, to be read when Noel is 18 years old. And it's about specifically the first 10 days after she left. So I'd like for you to read this passage. And if you can start with, I have told you about these 10 days. I have told you about these 10 days, Noe, hoping some of it might be useful as you determine what kind of woman to be. We are stuck with the project of becoming ourselves, a task we ignore to our great peril.

Do not absolve me. Do not forgive me. Only hear me. Consider my story. Up until age 10, you saw matriarchs following the doctrine of duty. But now, through my betrayal, you've seen an alternate way. Whichever path you choose, at least you know it's not the only option. Freedom is a brutal assignment with many punishments. Conformity's punishments can be even harsher, though they're often less visible. Blow out your candles. Be careful what you don't wish for. the curiosities you're too successful to speak, the hungers that threaten disruption.

In one of the books about women who leave their children, remember the librarians list, a narrator says something like, sometimes you have to escape in order not to die. I don't think the tricky part is the escape. Abandonment is easy. Any fool can do it. No wonder dads leave all the time. Siddhartha was neither noble and questing nor depraved. He was a dude, acting on a whim. No, the real challenge is noticing you are dying in the first place, because it happens incrementally, year by year, and camouflages itself as life.

Thank you for reading that. We heard April reference, Sadrtha. That's the book from Herman Hessey of 1922. It's about a man who leaves his family to find himself. We call that enlightenment. When I finished the book, I was really reflecting on this. Like, April's envy of that freedom that Siddhartha has, I mean, that's clear. Although with April, it's called abandonment. And when did you first identify that double standard? Well, this book is fictional all the way. But one thing I do share in terms of my...

life story with April as I read Sadartha in high school. And I was enraptured by his story of who am I? What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of my life? At the same time, I had a similar response to how April responds in the book, which is, well, gee, isn't that lovely? He gets to just go leave it all behind and find God. I grew up in a very spiritual household. My mother is a spiritually gifted woman. And I wanted her to take a pilgrimage, a lifelong pilgrimage, like Siddhartha took, so that she could find her own version of enlightenment. And we could benefit from the wisdom that she discovered. But she had to, like, find God while she was doing the dishes. So I remember feeling kind of bitter about that, even in high school feeling like a lady wouldn't get to do

that. Just dudes get to go on the road, hit the road, be the pilgrim. make their progress. So much of your work keeps returning to Philadelphia, but your origin goes back even further to Puerto Rico, your grandmother's journey to this country. She took her own quest. She took her hero's journey to come to Philadelphia. What did you grow up knowing about that journey? It was neat growing up in Philadelphia and hearing my elder stories from,

Puerto Rico, where they came from. My abuela came with her daughters in tow, so my mom was 12 years old when they all arrived in Philadelphia. Now, they originated in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, which is a coastal town, and they were farmers. And there's varying points of view on why they left. Everyone has a slightly different story. It's quite a Rashiman sort of narrative. Maybe they left because there had been a kind of infidelity from her partner. Maybe they left because my eldest aunt needed better health care than was available to treat a condition she was facing. The thing I loved about hearing these stories is they were holy, holy, holy, unlike the world that was familiar to me. I didn't step foot in Puerto Rico until I was nine.

So up until the age of nine, I had to just imagine what is a mountain in Portland in? Puerto Rico. What is a farm in Puerto Rico? What is it to sleep under mosquito netting every night? What is it to feel your first refrigerated drink, you know, when you're five years old because you've only had warm, fresh cow's milk, like you don't have a refrigerator. So these were real stories that to me felt like fables or imagined lands. And I think I had to leave Philadelphia to write my community stories because I kind of only know how to tell the story in hindsight when you've already left it. That's how I grew up hearing them. So that's kind of how I tell them now.

Hiara, you studied music composition at Yale, not playwriting. You were going to be a composer. What happened? I stayed a composer. My instrument is now words. I'm not practicing for hours alone at the piano every day. Instead, I'm practicing storytelling in my mind and on pieces of paper every day. So I have studied dramatic structure since my musical studies ended, but I actually think those musical studies are more informative for how I structure a long-form narrative and also how I kind of think about writing at the sentence level. I love music. I love the cadence of words. And it's just Sentences are the funnest place to play in service of a larger story. You and Lynn Manuel Miranda have been collaborators for now.

It's been about two decades now. So in the Heights, Vivo, that is really a particular kind of trust. It's like handing the emotional architecture to someone else. And it's a mix of the story and the music. How did you two learn to build together? I can see now that one of the things that weaves through the pieces I've done with Lynn is we're very playful. They're joyous works. They're effervescent works.

You know, in The Heights is probably the happiest thing I've ever written, followed closely by Vivo. And we just get that kind of playful side out of each other. It's a little bit more natural to him. He's a very upbeat and optimistic person. I definitely have a dark broody side that comes out in pieces like the White Hot. So it's really about just being like, you know, you remember when you were a kid and you'd have a friend and you'd just be like, hey, you want to come over and play? That's it. Like, that's the basic relationship that we have when working.

You want to come over and play? And what are we working on today? You know, I had this idea. I wrote this scene, but maybe it will be better as a song. Check it out, Lynn. And an hour later, he's like, I've got a hook for it. I remember working on the animated movie Vivo together, and I had this idea for a new character who ended up becoming quite central to the movie. She was just on the periphery at first, and this is the character of Gabby.

And she's a wild child. She's always at volume 10. She's always the loudest one in the room. She unapologetically takes up space. And Vivo is a very kind of uptight type A musician. He wants to practice his skills and he wants them to not have a note mistake in them. Okay, Gabby does not care about the note mistake. And so we're talking about this character.

How do we weave her in? And I was like, you know, she needs a song. I think she's going to let's give her a big crazy song. And he's sitting there on the floor and he's going, uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-uh. And this is how I know. We've worked together for a long enough. I'm like he's already got a hook in his head. And a few minutes later, he's jotted down or thumbed these words into his notes app and his phone.

Own drum, ho hum, and I'm giving him some more language. Well, here's a monologue, she might say, about taking the school bus home. You know, a whole big monologue, he takes three syllables from that. And it becomes, I get my own seed on the bus. So it's really like a hacky sack game. Come over and play. And let's do hacky sack. And what we're going to keep in the air.

is the ideas, the word, the energy of a scene. This sounds like a dream. It sounds like a dream because there's no ego here. Has that ever been an encounter, though, where you guys are kind of at odds, at a particular, you have a different interpretation of what the it should be? No. I don't remember a single time, to be honest. If we're feeling like something's not working, we just are kind of like, hmm, okay, noticed. And I've found with writing, identifying that something is not quite working, is not quite firing

on all cylinders is very different, is almost a separate act from remedying that. One does not follow the other necessarily. So it's just kind of like, okay, let's put a sticky note on that one, and let's keep working, and then maybe we'll come up with an idea in a roundabout way. So very little ego. When I'm working alone on a play or on my books, that's where I'm warring with myself. much more actively. No, no, no, no, it can't be this. It has to be that. It can't be this. It has to be that. And so I think that my pieces I've created on my own have a kind of tension that reflects those internal battles as I'm writing a little bit more clearly.

And the lightness of the pieces that I've written with Lynn probably does reflect a little bit of our working process together. When I hear you talk about this, I'm just thinking what this means is you have to give your projects time and space. Because if you're putting a posted and saying, this is not working, only time is going to allow you to kind of see the pieces to put together. Is that what you mean by like one thing doesn't happen right after the other? You know, finding the solution doesn't happen right at the point of diagnosing the problem. Yeah, you know, there is this saying, you know, if you stare directly at the sun, you'll go blind. Writing is not problem solving. If you try to solve a problem in writing, you'll have solved the problem.

But will you have made the piece more artful? Not necessarily. So that's why things need to breathe. It's like, okay, now we know, you know, there's a family argument in the Heights that we worked on forever. Nina comes home and she's got big bad news to deliver to her parents. She's really, really struggling as a first-generation college student. And she knows her parents are not going to fathom the struggle. They're just like, you're making our dreams come true.

you've made it. And she's like, it's a whole different beast out there, guys. Now, that was a song. That was a different song. That was a scene. It was a different scene. It took so many tries to kind of get that moment dramatically right. But that doesn't mean that, therefore, for two months in a row, we were just working on that every day. I mean, we just suffocate it if that was the approach. So it's like, okay, let's write a song about the piraguerro selling icies on. the street. And that's going to clear our spirits. That's going to give us some new artistic energy to work with. Oh, and maybe there will be a solution that kind of comes and finds us for that other problem we were dealing with. Were there biographical elements of Nina, of your life in Nina? Definitely. Being the first in the family to go to college was a big one. And that struggle of, you know, like Nina, my parents came to Philadelphia, really built a life, a calling, a community, and a family in the Puerto Rican community. It was an under-resourced time, and my parents were working very hard in North Philly to create health centers, to create bilingual services, to create infrastructural need. and they were doing this within, as I mentioned, a very enclosed and tight-knit Puerto Rican community.

Then for me to go off to a space that there's almost no Latinos at, they had really not been in a space like that in their life. And so that was a shock to me, and it was a shock I couldn't totally convey to them. They didn't totally have experience with that. Kiara Alagria, Hughieze, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks so much for bringing out some stuff I hadn't even thought of with the book yet. Kiara Alagria-Hudis' new novel is called The White Hot. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producers are Danny Miller and Sam Brigger.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.