Reviews with content warning for Addiction - My Broken Language: A Memoir

I am partial to this coming of age story in part because the author grew up in Philadelphia, negotiating between her white Jewish father’s suburban life with his second family and her Puerto Rican mother’s extended family in the Latinx neighborhood of north Philadelphia. She is honest about the crises within her community (including crack epidemic and AIDS) and about her ability to navigate her way out (she went to a public academic magnet high school and then Ivy League universities). A successful lyricist for Broadway musicals, she also writes with a lyrical touch.

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hollyd19's review

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challenging emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

This memoir is a masterpiece.

Quiara Algería Hudes uses every inch of this book to embrace her wholeness in a world hostile to her nuances. When discussing this read with my book club, someone described Hudes as a stained glass window and I cannot imagine a more apt comparison.

Recounting her childhood, Hudes invites the readers alongside her journey to find language to encapsulate the many dimensions of her identity: Puerto Rican, daughter, Jewish, white-passing, English-Spanglish-Spanish speaking, cousin, North Philly resident, pianist, big sister, activist, Quaker, academic… Her deeply bonded maternal family grounds her and empowers her search for her truth. Her mother, a practitioner of Santería, fosters Quiara’s curiosity, self-confidence, and ambition. Her tias and cousins expand her world and provide ballast when seas are rocky. Her neighborhood offers community, connection, and courage.

Hudes is a gifted storyteller and I was struck by the richness of her language, especially in a book ostensibly dedicated to its “brokenness.” She seamlessly intertwines cultures, dialects, and slang across seemingly disparate groups — a skill honed as she grew into a Pulitzer-winning composer and playwright. I alternated the physical book with the audiobook which added verisimilitude to the reading experience (Hudes narrates herself). Additionally, Hudes commits to telling her story honestly but not tragically. She doesn’t dwell on the hardest parts of her life. Instead, she acknowledges them plainly but spends much more energy celebrating the Perez women in all their diverse, indefatigable glory.

I turned the last page with enlivened understanding and fresh hope. I so deeply recommend this read.

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caseythereader's review

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emotional funny reflective sad medium-paced

3.75

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hannahdotmay's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0

A memoir to rival most, My broken language is  Quiara Alegría Hudes chance to tell us of girlhood in Philadelphia, an adolescent at yale and a coming of age at Brown. She, like us all, has had many iterations, a daughter of immigrants, raised in a matriarchal community built on Puerto Rican spirituality and socialist values, a writer, a composer, a playwright. She has lived many lives and laid bare both her mistakes and accolades. 

Language is at the heart, expressions of Spanish and Spanglish fall in equal measure. She talks of an upbringing surrounded by a community language, one that united her family but separated her as she climbed the echelons of social mobility, joining her middle-class counterparts studying Bach and Mozart, in the hallowed halls of Yale. 

Background commentary on the AIDS epidemic, how it ravaged her specific community, how they lacked the words or desire to express the grief from a hideous disease, her phrasing is so poignant, she talks of hushed voices and gaunt cheeks, watching loved ones waste away and wondering in her childhood naivety, what she could have done differently. Poverty, neglect and gentrification are rife among her smart social commentary, houses that weren’t built to hold families, mothers who weren’t always equipped to raise sons. 

There is an absence of masculinity as Hudes attributes much of her selfhood to her mother, a community activist and spiritual leader, a woman among women who raised her and her cousins, and taught them lessons of self-love and respect. She talks of the legacy of a body, the curves that were passed down through generations, the love she had for families of thick thighs and luscious chests, she speaks only of skinny when it shows illness and hurt, ‘I didn’t learn about [it] until blood sickness rolled into town’ 

it compares to in the dream house, to how we fight for our lives, to hunger a memoir of my body. It is a memoir of self hood and belonging, a white America obsessed with assimilation and a thriving community who are competing to show them, western isn’t the only way.

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