My Broken Language (2021) by Quiara Alegría Hudes had been on my list for a while, and I’m so glad that I finally listened to this memoir. Hudes, a Pulitzer award-winning playwright, co-authored In the Heights with Lin Manuel-Miranda, and she narrates the audiobook, which I think enhances the listening experience.
Hudes’ mixed Puerto Rican and white identity, and extended family and time spent separately living with her mother and visiting with her father are central to the first part of the narrative. Through her own story, she also tells the story of her mother and her grandmother emigrating from a farm in Puerto Rico, first to New York, and then to West Philadelphia, where she spends her formative years, with many cousins who lived life in the barrio the best that they could.
She spends a lot of time in the memoir examining her own spirituality, as her experience as the daughter of a atheist Jew, granddaughter of a Catholic, and daughter of a practitioner of Caribbean santeria. She writes about attending Quaker meetings and finding peace in the silence. At the same time, she is taught how to play piano by an aunt (on her father’s side) while her Puerto Rican stepfather brings home a battered piano for her, which she uses to teach herself to transcribe and repeat what she hears on the radio.
Her languages being English, Spanish, and music, she tries to combine them all when she goes to Yale to study music composition, and later goes to Brown for an MFA in creative writing. Near the end of the memoir, she writes about her sister Gabriela being born when she is a teenager. Gabriela is one hundred percent a child of the barrio, and Hudes becomes explicitly fat positive because Gabriela is perfect exactly as she is.
Hudes’ writing is beautiful, and she weaves so many things together. I highly recommend it!
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Reading While Fat 
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