This book was amazing. It was a whirlwind of what the author's life has been like yet it captured much of what I went through. I often found little gems of wisdom in the characters' words and was compelled to write them down and/or commit them to memory. You will love this book no my your ethnic race but as a Latinx I think perhaps we might feel it a different way but that is just me. Hudes does an excellent job of weaving together traditions, food, music, sayings, and life experienced as a generation brought here to the US or one that was born here but your parents were not. Take the time to walk this journey of the author's memories and enjoy.

From North Philly to Yale to an MFA, music to playwriting to memoir, English to Spanglish to Spanish, "Qui Qui" traces her childhood influences on her identity: her mother's activism and religion, the "Silence=Violence" of the AIDS/SIDA crisis (especially in the Puerto Rican community), her relationship with her white father and stepmother, her cousins, and her little sister, Gabi. She meditates on the inequality of why she should have access to the Sterling Library while her prima Nuchi was passed from grade to grade and graduated high school illiterate, and she uses the tremendous power of her unique voice.

Quotes

It felt like my life's intact boat had crashed, boards splintering off and drifting in disparate directions. It was baffling, watching parts of myself get further and further from each other. (32)

The awful scene made me wonder if I'd felt a real feeling ever and made me doubt whether I wanted to. (75)

...a turtle in a rush is a marvel to behold. (89)

My words and my world did not align. (98)

...I sensed freedom in how [Duchamp] treated virtuosity as a stepping-stone to something less rigid. (124)

...if you're fluent in a language, there's a place you belong. (127)

...this...was not everyone's America. Seeing my cousins suffer was anguish enough. Seeing the disproportionality slayed me. (135)

Quiet and secrecy, I discovered, were not always indicators of shame but were proven strategies of resilience and resistance. (163)

Narrative armor, safe places to land, instructions for survival sent to future generations. That is, if we in the future could decode them. (230)

Truth being: the divide [between Yale's affluence and North Philly's scarcity] was where I had made my home.Until I became a bridge, if such a reconciliation was possible, there would be no peace. (231)

English was not simply a language, but a betterment project. (240)

But had [music], would it ever, bring me closer to myself? Can a haven, in fact, ever do that? (256)

It was the notion that no single hemisphere or address wore an aesthetic crown, that the task was to put one's world onstage. (278)

Find your fellow travelers....When a door opens for you, bring another person through. -Paula Vogel (280) ( )

I am not really a fan of artists' coming-of-age story, and this memoir reinforces my view. They key thing that's important is that the artist-hero is awesome and we get that in spades here. There is a part where Hudes pursues music but a professional musician tells her she's not good enough which I was surprised that she disclosed, even though it came after her regaling the reader with stories of impressing her Yale professors and fellow students with her musical abilities. Her life, her embrace of her Puerto Rican/Taino identity, is just not enough to drive a memoir. ( )

This nonfiction memoir tells the story of how the author, now a 40-year-old playwright and growing up in a rich stew of cultural influences, learned to find her own language and identity. Her mother’s side, the Perez family, was Puerto Rican; they lived almost in an enclave in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Her father was white, and after he remarried, although he lived only an hour away, his middle class suburban white world seemed like another universe to Quiara, far away from the raucous world of her extended family in Philly.

Dad and his new wife Sharon lectured Quiara about “inner-city problems,” seemingly wanting her to make a choice to identify with what they considered to be a superior expression of her whiter color. They had plenty of judgment about her other world, but no real clue what it meant to live with little money, inferior health care, prejudice, underfunded schools, and the constant negative expectations of others. She thought to herself: “Who were dad and Sharon anyway? King and queen of Shit-Don’t Stink Land?” Emotionally, she preferred the Perezes, even though life was hard, and even though, intellectually, she wanted to explore the languages of the white world.

For a while, she inhabited the spaces in between.

At first Quiara thought she found a way to express herself and the pain, confusion, but also joy she felt, through music, which she studied at Yale. But what she found was alienating. She wrote: “Many dictionaries live in this world, and at Yale, ‘music’ came from a different Webster, with a different definition. The word meant a particular type - Western classical - without even having to specify. ‘Music’ was a synonym for ‘white.’”

She knew she didn’t want to be part of a world that blindfolded itself to her other culture, and that “didn’t other entire hemispheres of art.”

Then she turned to literature in a creative writing workshop at Brown University, and especially books by others occupying borderlands: Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison. She learned that she didn’t have to be “loyal” to English. Language that aims toward perfection, her instructor told her, is a lie, reminding her that Shakespeare knew this, and broke English until its dictionaries grew by a thousand entries.

She began to write plays that combined her facility with language with the stories of the matriarchal world of the Perez women: “My pantheon, my Perez women, my biblical ribs and mud. Out of their rough, mortal flesh was fashioned my tempo and taste.”

She wanted to share their history, and incorporate *their* language - “Spanglish’s ever-shifting syntax and double-rich sonority” into the mainstream.

As of this writing, she has experienced a great deal of success. Her play Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water by the Spoonful.

Evaluation: So many children now grow up on the borders, between two cultures, and they struggle with which world will claim their identities. This revealing memoir will help readers understand the conflicts that often threaten to tear apart the children of diverse unions. ( )