When I reach novelist and poet Luis Alberto Urrea, he and his wife and research partner Cindy are fresh off another Zoom call with his book marketing team in New York, working out the plan for his newest novel, Good Night, Irene. As Cindy helps him position the camera, a painting of his mother in uniform on the wall behind him, he tells me it was “kind of scary” but also that “the pregame excitement is really moving to me because I think a lot of my books have had to be explained a lot. It’s given them challenges, me with my border stuff, and here we are—it wasn’t a devious plot on my part to do a World War II book about an American woman …”
For Urrea, who is best known for his writing about the people living near and crossing the U.S./Mexico border, including the 2005 Pulitzer finalist The Devil’s Highway, his novel Good Night, Irene ventures, in one way, into new territory. It follows two American women, Irene and Dorothy, as they enlist in the Donut Dolly Clubmobile program of the Red Cross during the later years of World War II and are sent to the front lines in Europe to provide food—namely donuts—and a reminder of home to American soldiers. Yet the story also remains firmly in Urrea’s wheelhouse of writing about his family history—Irene is based on his mother who was a “Donut Dolly.”
Family is the throughline for much of our conversation. When I ask about how he drafts his novels generally, Urrea connects it to his family. The Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America are based on his great aunt Teresita Urrea, the Saint of Cabora. “After 25 years of research, I had the timeline of her life. It was a skeleton upon which I could extrapolate details in my own style.” Likewise, the 2018 bestseller, House of Broken Angels “was about the last weekend of my big brother’s life and so again, that gives you a kind of outline in a way historically that you can then lie around.”
