The WD Interview: Luis Alberto Urrea

This interview first appeared in the July/August 2023 issue of Writer’s Digest magazine.

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.”

Given that writing about these personal events, like his brother’s final days or the undiagnosed PTSD his mother faced as a result of her service, means having to talk about them extensively in public, I’m curious about how Urrea takes care of his own mental health. His answer was surprisingly uplifting: “Not to be too precious, but it does get to you sometimes. But if you could go with us on the road, you’d see how astonishing it is for me. People that I would’ve never been able to talk to come and they’ll share something with you or they’ll just want a hug or they’ll cry or they’ll pull you aside and whisper something about their lives to you. It’s so great.”

But it isn’t just readers that Urrea gets to know in unexpected ways through his writing. When I ask him to tell me more about the research that went into Good Night, Irene, he shares how he learned to see his own mother through a different lens.

You spent decades researching one part of your family. Now, with Good Night, Irene, you’ve got a story inspired by this whole other part of your family. How has the research and the writing differed with this new novel?

It’s not research in a way because it’s my mom, and I grew up with this story. I grew up with the ramifications of the story but not really understanding it. I think the great crime we commit is thinking, Oh, it’s just Mom. … I didn’t really understand what she had gone through or what she had survived and who she really was. I’ve said this a couple of times to people because I’m talking to interviewers often or addressing groups, but it hit me suddenly that my mom was the only American in my whole family. She was in exile from New York and from everyone she knew, and I didn’t even realize how lonely that must have been for her. She was suffering the ramifications and echoes of her very hard experiences in combat.

You met Cindy earlier here. She’s a reporter and it’s helped me a lot doing some of the research in the books, because she’s a queen of research. We were talking one time and I started telling her more about my mom because she never met her. As soon as I started talking about these Clubmobile women, she was like, “Wait, what did you say?” “You know, Donut Dollies.” And she said, “What is that?” So, when I found myself telling Cindy, I started realizing, This is a really astonishing story actually. And we started trying to research it. It was really difficult because they were forgotten. …

The other part of it was finding her truck partner, her wartime best friend, the last of the Donut Dollies. That really opened the story for me.

“One of my main points is joy…” —Luis Alberto Urrea

I read in your letter in the advanced reader copy of Good Night, Irene about going to Europe and tracing their footsteps, but also that the records of these women had burned in a fire in the ’70s, and I thought that was incredible. How do we let this huge piece of our history just disappear?

It’s hard to comprehend. I think the Red Cross lost a lot of stuff. It was a warehouse. The women who went were super patriotic. They weren’t going to gain anything from it. They had reasons, obviously. I tried to hint at some of them in the book—some were escaping something—but most of them just wanted to go serve, wanted to go do something for their country. Certainly Jill, the woman who was the inspiration for Dorothy, she said she wasn’t going to stay in the back. She wasn’t going to be in the rear. She wanted to be up at the front. The only thing she could see that would take her to there—she wasn’t any kind of nurse, [but] she could drive a truck. And off they went.

We learned going through the papers that Jill left and my mother left, part of their training was to forget. Part of their training was to not actually know where they were headed so that if they were captured—and they were given provisional officers ranking in case the Germans caught them to try to avoid atrocity—but they were trained not to know where they were going, and they often didn’t know.

In the first 80 pages, the characters go from their homes to D.C. to New York City to Liverpool to London to Cambridge, and many more locations to come. What kind of challenges did that present for you and for your editors in terms of plotting or even just remembering where they were at a given time?

It was quite the challenge actually, and I obviously got things wrong. In fact, when we took the trip to Germany, we rented a badass BMW and off we went down the Autobahn. I had all my notes about the trip, and [thought], Wow, this is great. We went to Buchenwald, and we did all this stuff, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I was going the opposite direction of the way they went. My editor is a stickler on detail, and he’d say, “Wait a minute. That’s not possible because this is however many hundred kilometers away from where you’re talking about.” I had to curb my enthusiasm and try to get precise. This actually happened in the real world. We’re not in Narnia. …

As far as the challenge for me, it was intense. But I had a lot of help. Everywhere we went, people flipped out because they didn’t know the story. For example, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans—incredibly helpful. The young docent we got in touch with took us in, and they didn’t have much, but they did have the actual uniforms. … If you see the black and white pictures, they look like they’re brown or gray, but they’re not. … It’s a beautiful blue. Eisenhower, that style monster, had haberdasheries in England make them, every one of their formal uniforms was a bespoke pattern. But they were all this beautiful blue. Who would’ve known?

I would not guess that at all, especially given some of the circumstances they find themselves in, having a bespoke uniform would seem a little frivolous.

But that’s for the formalities. In work they wore dungarees and white blouses, and they had aprons and so forth. Jill, the Dorothy character, she was, “To hell with this!” She wore coveralls with a wrap around her head. She wasn’t kidding around with that garbage. In their supplies, they were given silk stockings, and Jill gave hers away: “Who wants some stockings? I don’t want ’em!”

I hoped those details about Dorothy were true because I just loved her character.

Me too. I have to say, I’m in love with Dorothy. It was an extrapolation on the woman. My mom talked about her. … She always talked about “Darling Jill.” We knew that by the time I was starting to work on this, they [the Donut Dollies] were probably all dead. We thought that Jill had passed away. We were doing research from the “Urrea Research Center” here in the library, and Cindy found a video on YouTube. It’s called “Miss Jill Goes to War” [YouTu.be/eAwCMIiVdyA]. It was a local news report, but astonishingly from Champaign-Urbana, 90 minutes away from our house. And here’s Miss Jill, tough old woman, talking about the war. We flipped out. There was, in my mom’s stuff, a thing Jill had written, and there was an address tag on it. We thought, Oh my God, she may be alive.

We wrote her a letter, and she called us immediately when it got there. She was 94 years old, and she always called me Louis. None of that Luis business—Louis. I got on the phone with her: “Miss Jill, I can’t believe we got in touch with you and found you.” She said, “I’m 94 years old, Louis, you must get down here to see me. Don’t try to wait till I turn 95, if you get what I’m saying.” So, we drove down there, and we knocked on her door. When she opened the door and let us in—a portrait of my mom on the wall. It was fated.

We spent years with her. She died at 102. We hung out with her a lot. We interviewed her for hours and she shared her photo album. We had the photo albums of hers and my mom’s and both of their writings and her stories. It was so great. It was so moving to me. She still had the actual map that she had draped over the wheel as she drove the truck with her little writings all over it. She had drawings my mom had done. …

She really was this amazing vivid, vivacious soul who took the war in stride. Unlike my mom, she was not undone by it. She introduced me to my mother when she was 27, if you know what I mean, because she saw her in action. She saw that my mother was the source of joy for them all.

Order a copy of Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea.

There’s some great banter in Good Night, Irene, and it reminded me of a Katharine Hepburn film—very sharp and funny and smart. How did you channel the conversational style of that time period that the Donut Dollies would have had?

I think it’s lost to us now, but American English was so different back then, and it was snappy. All you have to do is look at those old movies. Bogart was the slowest talker, but everybody spoke fast, and they had a certain inflection in what they said—it was just the American voice. Miss Jill still had it—not so much in general, because she was 84, 85, 86, so she was getting slow and frail.

This is partially where it came from—my mother, when she was on a higher note, being giddy and happy, and Miss Jill, because she liked to go out. She was a member of the country club, and she also very much enjoyed being on a date. We would go to the country club, and then she would put her arm through mine. I would walk her up the stairs, and we were clearly on dates.

The waitresses all knew her, and they’d sit her down and say, “Miss Jill, you look like you need a little glass of joy juice,” which would be a Manhattan. She would demure and she’d say, “Oh, I don’t think so, maybe make it a double.” So, she had this timing. They would bring her joy juice and she would sit there frail and old, and she would take a sip or two. Then you’d see her get naughty. Her eyebrow would go up and she’d start looking around and she’d start zinging people at the table. Total transformation. And I thought, It’s like a time machine. … I just fell in love with it. It felt organic to me. I could almost hear them talking.

So, I won’t try to claim any literary genius thing, but it was just listening and seeing remnants of that style and being a fan of those old films.

I’ve laughed a lot in your books. They’re about some heavy topics like war, death, what happens at the U.S./Mexico border, but they’re all infused with such wonderful moments of humor. What’s your approach to that?

I don’t know what it is. It may just be some kind of weird failing on my part. I want to be moody. I want to be Jim Morrison or something and I think I end up being Steve Allen or one of those ’50s comics.

I don’t want to convey a lack of joy. I think life has so much joy and so many people are suffering so often. I teach at the University of Illinois, which is not necessarily the literary joy capital, but in my workshops, one of my main points is the joy. I mean, you’re getting to play with words and you’re getting to possibly change the very existence of someone you don’t know.

One of my writing rules that I tell the students—and they look at me a little oddly—but I tell them, “Laughter is a virus that infects us with humanity.” Once you can break through whatever your worries or barriers are with a good laugh or at least a feeling of community with somebody who’s “other” to you, then it’s hard to hate them. It’s hard to look down on them. And certainly, because so much of my work was representing border people and the undocumented, when you start to realize that we too, all of us, love our children. All of us feel hunger the same way. All of us want a better job, we can share laughter together. I’m proud that my readership is kind of mixed.

What has working with students taught you about your own writing?

It’s taught me about what the sheer joy of what we do is. If you get together with writers, you hear a lot of complaining and people have a lot of bourbon. [Laughs] But it’s such an astonishing thing. And especially for me, I didn’t think I was going to go anywhere, do anything. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English, and to be teaching all these writers at all these American universities feels like a little bit of vindication to me for the barrio. But I just think it’s a super blessing all the time.

Also, I had to do some gnarly back-breaking work for years and now I teach. I roll into a class, and I pontificate for an hour and a half, and we all say, “See ya.” Those people I work with are working all night, every night—like I have all my life—on their work. All of a sudden, you realize that the good stuff that’s happening now allows me to make connections for them and get their books published. Which is happening right now with one of my great grad students. You can’t beat that. I know that I’m just reenacting what Ursula [Le Guin] did for me. I’ll never be the legend Ursula is, but those things are good.

That’s the kind of feel-good story I love to hear in the writing community. Someone giving you that opportunity and now you’re doing that for your students too.

I feel as though it’s our job to remember where we came from and how it felt. If we get any place on the stairway, I believe we need to turn around and tell the next one that we know, “Come on, get up. I’m going to help you get up to where I’m at.” Because we have to look out for each other.

Let’s face it, there are people who want to be famous. There are people who want to be rich. And I always warn them, neither of those is likely to happen. It could happen, but this is a hard way to do it. You should learn to play guitar and go burn your amps on stage. It can be difficult, but we can’t stop ourselves. When you know someone who cannot not do it, that’s some sacred thing. That’s some incredible indwelling of the spirit and it’s nice to reach out to them.

You write nonfiction and novels that are historical, novels that are contemporary, poetry, and short stories. Do you have a preference among those different styles? How do you decide what you’re going to write next?

I have a really glib answer for that, and forgive me, but it’s kind of true. If I had my way, I’d be writing haiku day and night, little Richard Brautigan-style blurts about nothing. I’m starting to see that as my calling in life—just these little marvelous moments we don’t see that we should see. If you showed me a little spider on a dewy web, I could just sit there and write about that.

People ask me that question and I tell them, if I get this idea of a morning, of a sunflower still wet with the overnight rain, probably haiku. But if I get the idea of writing a new history of World War II, probably a book. But to me, it’s all of a process. And I, being self-taught, didn’t understand there were people who specialized. Jim Morrison sang for The Doors and wrote books of poems. I thought, Cool, man! Leonard Cohen—I worshipped his records until I saw his novels and his short stories and his poetry. So, I thought, OK, that’s the secret. We are covering as many bases as possible here.

I thought I was a generalist like my dad. My dad was a blue-collar worker against his will. He worked in a bowling alley, and I learned from my father: This is how you shellac the bowling lane. This is how you clean out the toilets and the baskets of dirty stuff from the bathrooms. This is how you rebuild broken pins on a lathe. This is how you climb around the Brunswick machines. I thought, OK, my dad can do anything, so in writing, that’s what I thought. I was like a handyman carrying a box of tools. I had to try to figure out how to use it all.

What are you working on next?

There’s a lot more coming. At the same time that this mind-boggling experience is starting to happen of the Irene Machine, I have a book of poetry coming out from a little tiny press no one’s ever heard of. That’s the soul work. It’s just me being honest to the muse. …

Then my next book for Little Brown is a kind of a deeply mythologized and fictionalized history of Tijuana. It’s called The Zebras of Tijuana. It’s a wild picaresque romp. I just wanted to reassure my Mexican readers, I’m still here.

Do you have any last advice for the readers of WD?

Don’t miss any of the interviews. I learned so much from what other writers have to say, to this day.

Wear the bastards down. Just keep coming back. You’ll be told no. You don’t know when someone’s going to say, “Maybe.” …

My first book, Across the Wire, was rejected nonstop for 10 years. … It was published in 1993 after years of stuff like, direct quote from an editor in New York, “Nobody cares about starving Mexicans.” I told her, “That’s why I wrote this book.” … I’d been working with people actually starving 10 minutes from downtown San Diego. I wanted somebody to know. So, you just have to be really stubborn. 

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