What gave you that sense in that moment?

I think it was being kind of an older, wiser woman who had asked for permission long enough.

You know, I was a couple decades into my professional playwriting career.

Something happened where year after year I was auditioning my plays, and I started to see a pattern.

And all of these plays, I guess maybe with the exception of one or two, but pretty much every play I've written includes a young Latina character.

So seeing hundreds of real talent, like, come through the door, just powerhouse actor after powerhouse actor year after year, and there was one common thread, and it really started to weigh me down.

And this common thread was a sense of asking permission before taking up space, this kind of doe-eyed, am I okay to be here? Am I offending anyone? And, you know, and I was like, what is this common thread? A, a sense that their role was to make us, as the people auditioning them, comfortable.

I'm wondering if you can share those first two pages of the book with our listeners today.

Um, so I'd like for you to read this passage, and, um, if you can start with, "I have told you about these ten days."

"I have told you about these ten days, Noe, hoping some of it might be useful as you determine what kind of woman to be.

We are stuck with the project of becoming ourselves, a task we ignore to our great peril.

Do not absolve me.

Do not forgive me.

Only hear me.

Consider my story.

How did you two learn to build together?

Why was rage the emotion for April? Why was rage the white-hot?

I think it's not an emotion I have such healthy and direct access to, and so I wanted to explore that through a fictional character.

You know, what is anger? What purpose does it serve in our lives? Um, it's mostly been the province of men in popular culture and in, um, cultural narratives.

You know, what is an angry woman? And is there a way that anger can be productive, actually, in a different-- in addition to its destructive, um, components? And one of the things we discover in April's story is that as a child, she witnessed, um, a pretty traumatic act of violence.

Now, those of us who are familiar with PTSD know that when faced with, you know, something that triggers that, that memory, there's-- you-- it's fight or flight, it's freeze or fawn.

And so I, I wanted to write this character who fought.

She didn't fight when she witnessed this violent act.

An invisible border.

Do you want to read the first page of the novel for us?

I would love to.

So this is how it all begins, "Noelle received the envelope eight years after her mother's disappearance.

She got home from school and found it propped on the counter, oversized and leaning against the microwave door, clearly placed there by her dad or step-mother to catch her eye.

She ran a finger over the uppercase letters, Noelle Soto.

It wasn't the handwriting that dinged memory's bell so much as the pen's feral indentations.

No sender was named above the return address, but Noelle recognized those grooves like a gut recognizes a fist.

How would you describe April?