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Luis Alberto Urrea pays tribute to WWII's forgotten volunteers — including his mother

Maureen Corrigan

During World War II, the American Red Cross Clubmobile corps (shown here on an airfield in England in 1943) provided donuts, coffee and friendly conversation to the troops. AP hide caption

During World War II, the American Red Cross Clubmobile corps (shown here on an airfield in England in 1943) provided donuts, coffee and friendly conversation to the troops.

Many of us baby boomers grew up with World War II as a felt, if silent, presence. The fathers of my childhood friends served in the Air Force, the Army and my own dad in the Navy on a destroyer escort, but we kids knew of their war mostly through a few black-and-white photos, or the foreign coins that rattled in their dresser drawers. They really didn't talk much about the war.

Luis Alberto Urrea is a fellow baby boomer with a different World War II inheritance. His mother served as a Red Cross volunteer in an outfit called the Clubmobile corps, providing donuts, coffee and friendly conversation to the troops.

In an author's note to his panoramic historical novel, Good Night, Irene, Urrea tells us his mother was assigned to Patton's 3rd Army, trapped behind enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge , and was with the troops who helped liberate Buchenwald. Urrea also writes that his mother, who he now realizes suffered from undiagnosed PTSD, never spoke to him of her service.

Urrea is celebrated for his books about the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly his nonfiction work, The Devil's Highway , which was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Good Night, Irene is a departure: drawing on his mother's journals and scrapbooks and the spotty information that's survived about the Clubmobile corps, Urrea has written a female-centric World War II novel in the mode of an epic like Herman Wouk 's The Winds of War , replete with harrowing battle scenes, Dickensian twists of Fate and unthinkable acts of bravery and barbarity.

In Good Night, Irene , Urrea pays moving tribute to his mother and her Clubmobile comrades whose wartime service was largely forgotten because, even though they sometimes served under fire, they merely staffed what was called the "chow-and-charm circuit."

Urrea's main characters in this wartime buddy novel are two young women seeking escape and purpose: Irene Woodward, much like Urrea's own mother did, volunteers as a way out of a disastrous engagement back home in New York. Dorothy Dunford, a farmgirl from Indiana, has nothing left to lose: Her parents are dead and her brother was killed at Pearl Harbor.

Together, the women will become the crew of an American Red Cross Clubmobile dubbed, the Rapid City . It's a two-and-a-half ton marvel, equipped with two coffee urns, water tanks, boiler and burners, donut machine, Victrola and stacks of swing records, and rifle clips. As Irene reflects, "The truck was like a little B-17. Everything in its place. Bombloads of donuts in the racks, all arrayed vertically, waiting to be delivered."

Urrea's sweeping storyline follows the women's induction in Washington, D.C., a North Atlantic crossing where their convoy is attacked by U-boats, mechanic training and gas mask drills in the English countryside and, ultimately, arrival at Utah Beach a month after D-Day where the Rapid City joins a cadre of other Clubmobiles with regional pride names like the Annapolis and the Wolverine. Here are some descriptions of Irene and Dorothy multitasking in France:

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"The work had all faded into a long line of faces — faces and faces lined up at the window, staring at them. ... Small trucks came and went laden with more damned donut mix and coffee beans and sugar and grease and bags of letters they had to distribute. ... On their right hands both women sported aluminum rings fashioned by GIs out of the downed German airplanes scattered around the landscape ... They each felt like war brides to a few thousand husbands. ... It was also becoming clear, ... that their job had yet another feature nobody had trained them for. They were engaged on most nights in listening to confessions. ... [The boys] needed to talk. ... It was the Great Unburdening."

As befits a contemporary war novel, Good Night, Irene is morally nuanced: It doesn't turn away from scenes of random violence inflicted by our "boys" and it also acknowledges the traumas endured by many who served and survived. Maybe, in Good Night , Irene, Urrea has written yet another powerful "border story" after all: this time about the border between those who live in blessed ignorance of the worst humankind can do and those who keep that knowledge to themselves, often locked in silence.

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The ‘Doughnut Dollies’ of World War II

“Good Night, Irene,” a novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, sends two female volunteers to the Western Front.

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GOOD NIGHT, IRENE , by Luis Alberto Urrea

Writing fiction about your parents can be a minefield. (Sorry again, Mom!) On the one hand, you know all the angles; on the other, your perspective is inherently suspect. In “Good Night, Irene,” Luis Alberto Urrea, who is best known for “The Devil’s Highway” — his devastating account of 14 men who died attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border — tackles a radically different sort of story, about a war hero in his own family.

Urrea’s mother, Phyllis McLaughlin, joined the American Red Cross in 1943, not as a nurse but as a “Clubmobiler,” one of 250 women who accompanied General Patton’s troops through France and Germany after D-Day, surviving the Battle of the Bulge and witnessing the liberation of Buchenwald.

In 1943, when Phyllis’s fictional counterpart, Irene, escapes her wealthy family’s home on Staten Island — leaving behind a predatory stepfather and a violent fiancé — she imagines that war might be like wandering through the woods, one of her favorite pastimes: “Ambling. Filling notebooks with her own great thoughts. Perhaps some smoke drifting through the trees.” Needless to say, Irene’s illusions are soon shattered.

With Irene and her Clubmobile partner, Dorothy, Urrea creates two distinct female characters to send to war. Dorothy is an orphan from a farm in Indiana who prefers driving the Rapid City, their lumbering, 14-foot GMC military truck, to serving coffee and doughnuts from its retrofitted kitchen. Irene quickly falls in love with a dashing fighter pilot nicknamed the Handyman, but Dorothy takes more delight in the B-17s, Mustangs and Hurricanes themselves. As it turns out, neither serving refreshments nor driving the Clubmobile is the point: “The real service was that their faces, their voices, their send-off might be the final blessing from home for some of these young pilots. The enormity of this trivial-seeming job became clearer every day.”

In the story of the Clubmobile Corps, the official records of which were destroyed in a fire in the 1970s, Urrea finds the historical novelist’s gold: an empty space within a well-trodden time period in which to invent a story. He wears his extensive research lightly, but his immersion in the existing documentation is clear: “Irene sat on a hundred laps in the Aero Club’s makeshift portrait studio. Dorothy grumbled.”

Nicknamed “Doughnut Dollies,” the women become adept at deflecting advances, but it’s to Urrea’s credit that he doesn’t shy away from describing the shadow side of the job: They are expected to soothe the soldiers’ terror and homesickness, sometimes by sitting on the laps of men who try to kiss and grope them. The Clubmobilers are caregivers, sexual objects and motivating factors — stand-ins for mothers, girlfriends and wives — while often risking their lives to the same extent as the soldiers themselves.

Urrea writes about death with a sort of familiarity, a suspension of judgment that highlights the absurdity inherent in extreme violence. As he guides the reader through one inferno after another, he’s less a stone-faced Virgil than a master storyteller: “When they passed by these mausoleums, they averted their eyes, ashamed they had stacked their comrades and abandoned them to the elements. There was something ancient in this place. Something that counted these sacrifices.” Whatever it is, the G.I.s know that it is “not … American.” Or rather, they know that it’s old: Urrea is interested in the way still-wild landscapes consume the dead.

In “The Devil’s Highway” and “ The House of Broken Angels ,” his riotous recent novel about the patriarch of a Mexican American family, Urrea proved that he could tell a story from the point of view of the young, the old, men, women and even the dead — a choral impulse that he follows here with mixed results. This is partly because the balance is off; Irene’s perspective dominates the novel, but Urrea frequently slips into Dorothy’s head, and sometimes uses an omniscient narrator to foreshadow events of which Irene and Dorothy are unaware. When he returns to Irene, it’s as if his naturally fluid voice is forcing itself into a limited third-person straitjacket.

In one especially strange episode, Dorothy and Irene are observed climbing out of the basement of a destroyed house: “Aboveground, for anyone watching, the first sign of their resurrection would have been Dorothy’s boot kicking at a fallen slant of roof, which creaked open like a jaw, its nails like the great crooked teeth of a barracuda.” A house has collapsed on top of the two women, they’ve almost drowned in sewage from ruptured pipes, and rats have bitten their faces, but when they emerge into the light, their dialogue is disconcertingly lighthearted:

“Well, hell,” Irene said. They laughed in spite of it all. “Where’d everything go?” Dorothy asked.

Urrea has a weakness for melodramatic imagery: a volume of Shakespeare with a bullet lodged in its pages, a G.I. playing a burning piano in the smoldering ruins of a French village, a convoy of ambulances passing the Clubmobile, “sirens howling, with screams and groans coming from within the vehicles.” When the reader is forced to wonder about small elisions and inconsistencies, such as what Irene and Dorothy did about the facial rat bites (they aren’t mentioned again) or how they could hear groans over howling sirens, the characters themselves fade from view.

This problem becomes more acute when the terror of the war reaches its highest pitch, and the women are confronted with “a pair of signs, one pointing down to Weimar and the other uphill to someplace called Buchenwald.” Anyone who has visited a concentration camp will be willing to believe, as Irene tells Dorothy, that there’s “an atmosphere I can’t define,” even before the women know what they’re about to see. But we need to be absolutely enmeshed in a character’s consciousness to witness something on the order of Buchenwald through her eyes. Otherwise, the brutal catalog of the camp’s contents — a room full of suitcases and shoes, ovens, lampshades, emaciated “ghosts” in striped pajamas — evokes only our own familiar horror rather than Irene’s.

The novel is much stronger where it homes in on Irene’s experience. During the Battle of the Bulge, in January 1945, Irene and Dorothy take a bottle of Champagne to gunners operating a howitzer cannon. Dorothy is allowed to fire a shell, and then Irene gets a turn. “One of the gunners punched her arm. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘you musta taken out 20 of ’em.’” Slowly, the reality of what it means to have pulled the lanyard dawns on Irene: “What’d I do?” she asks.

Like many veterans of war, Irene and Dorothy keep their memories to themselves after they return to civilian life. Their mutual silence is the engine that propels the novel’s satisfying conclusion, but it’s also an acknowledgment that the two women have joined an exclusive society. Even as Urrea tells the Clubmobilers’ story, he recognizes that some parts of their experience remain impossible to share with those who weren’t there.

On one of their breaks from coffee and doughnut service in the Rapid City, while Irene is watching a plane fly overhead and dreaming of her fighter pilot, Dorothy begs her to pay attention to the two of them: “Irene, you are my family now. … I need you to understand what I’m saying. This is our story.”

Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, “The Limits,” will be published next spring.

GOOD NIGHT, IRENE | By Luis Alberto Urrea | 407 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $29

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GOOD NIGHT, IRENE

by Luis Alberto Urrea ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 2023

Top-shelf historical fiction delivered with wit and compassion.

Two women witness the horrors of World War II via a snack truck.

Pulitzer Prize and NBCC Award finalist Urrea’s remarkable, elegantly written novel focuses on the Red Cross’ little-known Clubmobile Corps, which during World War II was charged with bringing coffee, doughnuts, and good company to weary GIs. The women had no medical training and were often condescended to as “Donut Dollies,” but because they were stationed in the heart of battle, they played no small part in improving morale and required a steely resolve of their own. Irene Woodward, who’s escaped New York and an abusive fiance, and Dorothy Dunford, who’s left her family and failing farm in Indiana, are paired together in a massive truck that, across the novel, heads from England to France and Germany in 1944 and 1945. En route, they witness some of the worst the post–D-Day European theater has to offer, from bombs to snipers to death camps; during lulls, the two fend off their share of harassment as well. (It’s all a recipe for PTSD and overwhelming for many; the Clubmobile was designed to be operated by three women, but so many drop out there’s a running gag about an unnamed “Third Girl in the Truck.”) Irene, artsy and romantic, has an opposites-attract rapport with the no-nonsense Dorothy, which Urrea plays for both humor and pathos, but he stresses how unified they are in absorbing the constant surprises and tragedies of warfare; a sunny retreat to Cannes is followed by a trek to Buchenwald. This material is personal for Urrea, whose mother served in the Clubmobile Corps, and a few sentimental notes slip into the story. But there’s plenty of grit, detail, and twists that make for both a fine page-turner and an evocation of war’s often cruel randomness.

Pub Date: May 30, 2023

ISBN: 9780316265850

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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by Luis Alberto Urrea

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Sally Rooney

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Book Summary and Reviews of Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea

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Good Night, Irene

by Luis Alberto Urrea

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In the tradition of The Nightingale and Transcription , an exhilarating World War II epic that chronicles an extraordinary young woman's heroic frontline service in the Red Cross

In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military buses called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle. After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Their time in Europe will see them embroiled in danger, from the Battle of the Bulge to the liberation of Buchenwald. Through her friendship with Dorothy, and a love affair with a gallant American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope, which becomes more precarious by the day, is for all three of them to survive the war intact. Taking as inspiration his mother's own Red Cross service, Luis Alberto Urrea has delivered an overlooked story of women's heroism in World War II. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances, Good Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea's "gifts as a storyteller are prodigious" (NPR).

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Irene and Dorothy have very different reasons for joining the Clubmobile Corps. What do you think each of them hopes to get by joining, and do they find what they're looking for?
• The Rapid City's commandments are: "Roll on down the road. Nothing means a thing. Don't look back. Don't apologize. Don't concede. Don't let them see you cry. The Rapid City comes first. Never surrender." How does each of these come across in the women's daily experiences? Does upholding the commandments change how they see their role in the war?
• Dorothy comments that everyone loves Irene. Why does Irene cultivate this image of herself? How does it differ from Dorothy's own self-created image when speaking to the Gls? Do the versions of ...
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"A moving and graceful tribute to friendship and to heroic women who have shouldered the burdens of war." ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) "[A] remarkable, elegantly written novel ... there's plenty of grit, detail, and twists that make for both a fine page-turner and an evocation of war's often cruel randomness. Top-shelf historical fiction delivered with wit and compassion." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "With cinematic verisimilitude and deep emotional understanding, Urrea opens readers' eyes to the female Red Cross volunteers who served overseas during WWII, delivering donuts, coffee, and homestyle friendliness to U.S. troops ... WWII fiction fans, who have an abundance of options, should embrace Urrea's vivid, hard-hitting novel about the valiant achievements of these unsung wartime heroines." ― Booklist "Urrea bends a fertile bough from his own family tree in Good Night Irene , a sweeping novel loosely based on his mother's experiences as a plucky, rebellious Red Cross volunteer with the so-called Donut Dollies on the battlefields of WWII, and the love stories — both romantic and platonic — that followed her home." ― Entertainment Weekly "Every once in a while the universe opens its heart and pulls out a book like this novel, gifting it to the cosmos. In Good Night, Irene , a new element has been created, and the literary world is reborn in the image of Luis Alberto Urrea. His voice comes alive on every page of this magnificent novel." ―Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of The Many Daughters of Afong Moy and Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet " Good Night, Irene is a beautiful, heartfelt novel that celebrates the intense power and durability of female friendship while shining a light on one of the fascinating lost women's stories of World War II. Inspired by his own family history—and his mother's heroism as a Red Cross volunteer during the war—Luis Urrea has created an indelible portrait of women's courage under extreme adversity. Powerful, uplifting, and deeply personal, Good Night, Irene is a story of survival, camaraderie, and courage on the front line." ―Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds "A heart-wrenching wartime drama, a rich portrait of friendship, and an exploration of the trials and triumphs of the human spirit, Good Night, Irene is historical fiction at its finest. Using the little-known true story of women who worked behind the front lines for the Red Cross during World War II, Luis Alberto Urrea weaves a novel about the enduring bonds, devastating losses, and heroism of ordinary people who put their lives on the line for freedom. This is a story that needed to be told and remembered." ―Christina Baker Kline, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and The Exiles

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Luis Alberto Urrea Author Biography

photo: Joe Mazza Brave-Lux

Hailed by NPR as a "literary badass" and a "master storyteller with a rock and roll heart," Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph. A 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction and a Guggenheim fellow, Urrea is the critically acclaimed and best-selling author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, "I am more interested in bridges, not borders." Urrea's book, Good Night, Irene , takes as inspiration his mother's own Red Cross service. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in harrowing circumstances,...

... Full Biography Author Interview Link to Luis Alberto Urrea's Website

Name Pronunciation Luis Alberto Urrea: oo-Ray-ah

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Luis Alberto Urrea discovers the wartime magic of the ‘Donut Dollies’

The prolific author imagines the World War II heroism of his mother in a new novel, ‘Good Night, Irene’

In the winter of 2021, I learned about a Vietnam War veteran who had searched for half a century to find two Red Cross workers who had spent just a few hours with him — strolling, chatting, having lunch — at his remote base outside Saigon during the war.

The vet, Jim Roberts, had snapped quick photos of the young women and was on this quest simply because he wanted to thank them. At first, I found this hard to comprehend. All that, after just a few hours of small talk?

But the more I discovered about the women, who were part of a group with roots in World War II known affectionately as “Donut Dollies,” the more it made sense. For soldiers mired in despair and scarred, both emotionally and physically, the sound of these women’s American voices, the silly talent shows they sometimes led and the casual conversations they initiated lent a sense of normalcy and offered a brief respite from the surreal nightmare they were living.

After 50 years, the mystery of these Vietnam War photos of 'Donut Dollies' is solved

The magic of these brief encounters is captured beautifully in “ Good Night, Irene,” a new novel by Luis Alberto Urrea, a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction best known for his gripping chronicles set along the U.S.-Mexico border, including the Pulitzer finalist “The Devil’s Highway: A True Story.” “Good Night, Irene” was inspired by the experiences of Urrea’s mother, Phyllis de Urrea, who served in the Red Cross’s “Clubmobile Corps,” which dispatched young women to the European war theater in trucks equipped with doughnut-making machines, hence “Donut Dollies.” (By the time of the Vietnam War, the women had stopped making doughnuts, but the nickname stuck.)

With each turn of the page, a feeling builds that Urrea is on his own quest, a decades-long journey to fill in the blanks of a period in his family history that his mother — struggling with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder — did not want to revisit. When Urrea’s mother died, in 1990, he was able to sift through her journals and scrapbooks, which unspooled the time she’d spent traveling with George S. Patton’s Third Army through France, Belgium and Germany, and ultimately to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

The book, which Urrea stresses is a work of fiction, rather than a biography, follows Irene Woodward and Dorothy Dunford as they drive into dangerous battleground zones across Europe in a rattletrap 2½-ton mobile doughnut-making truck named the Rapid City. Irene has signed up to escape a physically abusive romantic relationship on Staten Island; Dorothy is extracting herself from the misery and heartbreak of deepening rural poverty in Indiana. Amid war, they find purpose.

“Wherever they went, they were stars,” Urrea writes. “Every G.I. wanted the Donut Dolly treatment. Just a flirt. A baseball score. Some jokes. A wink. They all dreamed of a dance. They drank the women’s American accents like beer.”

Urrea, who also has published poetry , has a gift for writing heart-pounding action scenes that are also lyrical. A bombed hotel “wept dust.” Roofs “come apart like leaves in an upward wind.” A wounded soldier cups his hands to try to catch blood gushing from his forehead, “as if he were in prayer.”

Dead Men Walking — 'The Devil's Highway: A True Story,' by Luis Alberto Urrea

Irene and Dorothy fill an almost sacred void. As the fighter pilots prepare to launch on secret missions, the two women are there, working fast to distribute coffee and doughnuts, which they call “sinkers.” They understand that the words they exchange in those pre-dawn hours may be among the last casual banter the pilots ever hear.

“Dorothy took to calling these mornings ‘Church,’ and they did feel like religious services, with the men heading into peril, to do deadly work, and everyone knowing but not acknowledging that they might never return,” Urrea writes.

In moments like that one, a reader can’t help but reflect on the roles that so many Americans have played in our decades of almost constant war — not just the men and women who wield the weapons and stitch the wounds, but also those who ease the mental strain. They, too, are worthy of our thanks.

The Dorothy and Irene of Urrea’s book are a kind of proto-version of those heroes, long before terms such as PTSD were so deeply embedded in our vernacular, as they have been in the aftermath of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dorothy and Irene become both psychologists and confessors, tending to the young man pained and confused because he’d stomped to death a civilian, the soldier contemplating killing himself because his hands would not stop shaking and he couldn’t sleep, the captain who’d gotten a Dear John letter from his wife, cruelly scented with Chanel No. 5.

Those fleeting moments of kindness become so frequent that they blur in the minds of Dorothy and Irene. But not in the minds of the men whose lives they touched, such as the frightened soldier who wrote them a letter: “You won’t remember me, but I never forget you.”

Manuel Roig-Franzia is a Washington Post staff writer.

Good Night, Irene

By Luis Alberto Urrea

Little, Brown. 416 pp. $29

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The Presence of the Past in Good Night, Irene : A Conversation with Luis Alberto Urrea

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Award-winning writer Luis Alberto Urrea describes Good Night, Irene (Little, Brown, 2023) as “the book I have spent most of my life preparing to write.” This novel is inspired by his mother, Phyllis Irene McLaughlin, and by Jill Pitts Knappenberger for their work in World War II as part of the American Red Cross Clubmobile Service. Known affectionately as the Donut Dollies, these women were in the midst of combat as they drove their trucks from one site of battle to another. Urrea was aware that his mother had been one of the 250 Clubmobile women, but not until after she died did he learn that her war buddy Jill was still living and the keeper of an extensive archive. Years of conversations with Jill, research into the Clubmobile corps, and travel to key places of the European theater led to Good Night, Irene ’s fictional tribute to Urrea’s mother and her friend Jill as well as other overlooked but heroic women who served in World War II.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Devil’s Highway , Urrea (b. 1955) is the author of numerous other works of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, including the national bestsellers The Hummingbird’s Daughter and The House of Broken Angels (see WLT , Nov. 2022, 6). A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received many honors including a Pushcart Prize and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

Piedra , a collection of Urrea’s poetry, also came out in 2023 from FlowerSong , a small press in Texas whose purpose is “to nurture essential verse from, about, and through the borderlands.” Urrea donates his royalties to the press for their next book of poetry as a way, he says, “to use my work to publish other writers.” He does not want to forget his roots: “The milieu that created me always had a kind of communal feeling, so people who had success felt it incumbent upon them to give back. Since Little Brown/Hachette has given me an opportunity to enjoy the writing life, I am able to help somebody up the next step.”

Renee Shea : Originally, you intended to write a nonfiction account of your mother and the American Red Cross Clubmobiles, but you ran into difficulty with your research because so many of the records were destroyed in a fire. Then you met Jill Pitts Knappenberger (who inspired the character of Dorothy Dunford) and saw your way to a novel. That extraordinary coincidence seems a bona fide case of the stars being aligned, yet don’t you think that you knew in your bones that nonfiction wasn’t the book you wanted or needed to write?

Luis Alberto Urrea : If one of my students had turned in a story with such a coincidence, I’d have said, “Oh, come on.” When my wife, Cindy, who is a journalist and mad researcher, found an address for Jill in my mother’s archives, we realized that she might still be alive. As a shot in the dark, Cindy sent a note, and the day Jill received it, she called us. So, the last of the Donut Dollies, who happened to be my mom’s best friend and who drove the truck, was still alive and lived ninety minutes from our house—that’s true.

The novel actually began when we went to see Jill. When this ninety-four-year-old woman opened the door, the first thing I saw was a framed photograph of my mother looking gorgeous. I was taken aback, and she said (she always called me “Louis,” not “Luis”), “Louis, I drove the truck, but your mother brought the joy.” Suddenly, I saw my mom at twenty-seven—not tormented, haunted, or possibly even bitter but as this vivacious New York sophisticate who brought joy to help “the boys,” the GIs. I often think in terms of music, and my mother and Jill deserved as close to a symphony as I could write. That symphony had to be a novel.

Suddenly, I saw my mom at twenty-seven—not tormented, haunted, or possibly even bitter but as this vivacious New York sophisticate who brought joy to help “the boys,” the GIs.

Shea : How much did you know or suspect of your mother’s past before you met Jill? You reference your mother’s diaries, and then there is that “footlocker” where Irene keeps her journals and photographs. Was there a footlocker?

Urrea : Yes, I still have the footlocker with her former name stenciled on it: Phyllis McLaughlin. I was ordered not to go into Mama’s footlocker, but as soon as she went to work, I did. I found photos, some of Buchenwald, nude bodies, blood; and then when she came home Mother had to explain what had happened as much as she could to me at maybe seven or eight years old. She had all kinds of mementoes, including a soldier’s jacket that had a patch of every group she served sewn onto the sleeves, across the back and front. Because she felt that nobody really cared about what she had been through, she gave the jacket to a neighbor who was a World War II veteran. That broke my heart because I thought it was such a precious thing, but it also put me in gear because I realized that none of us understood what she was talking about—not really.

I was fortunate to have this archive, but some of it is unbearable. I cannot read her journals because they’re so full of PTSD, panic, and despair later in life. But in almost every photograph, she looks both glamorous and happy. There’s a wonderful picture in these archives of her—I believe in Bastogne—standing with a bunch of GIs having a cup of coffee just looking insouciant. Jill had extensive archives, even the actual map they used when she was driving the truck with her little notes and pencil marks all over it. I learned a lot, absorbed a lot, and imagined a lot as we went.

Shea : You offer us glimpses into Irene through her “jottings” in her notebook, poetry she reads or recalls. She is such an active participant in the world of war and her work, yet when she finds “a moment,” as she says, she’s the most astute and tender observer. In the midst of combat and concentration camps, she still sees beauty. I think you make her into an artist.

Urrea : I owe that to my mom or my impression of my mom. So many of those details about Irene in the novel are taken from her life. Her family really did live in Mattituck, she moved to Staten Island, they had the antique store. She came from a sophisticated New York world. Yet she spent a lot of time alone, a dreamy child reading books and no doubt keeping notebooks. She loved Edna St. Vincent Millay and the novel Green Mansions , by Henry Hudson, which she read and reread. When I was growing up, the heroes in our house were Twain, Fitzgerald, and especially Hemingway. A Moveable Feast brilliantly begins with the word “then”—and you’re flying from the first word into a story that already happened, but now this is happening. That’s how Good Night, Irene starts: “Then Irene Woodward escaped New York and went to war.” That’s my little homage to Hemingway but, by extension, to my mom.

In her papers, I discovered that my mom had a certificate signed by President Truman. I thought, “Wow, I have a Harry Truman autograph.” Then I turned it over to find that my mom had covered it with drawings. She did little watercolors all over Europe; I have a couple of those paintings. She was an aesthetic person.

All that was part of my upbringing. My mom was the only American in the family—also the only native English speaker, including me. Imagine this woman, this New York sophisticate whose family knew Steinbeck; her uncle would have beers with Albert Einstein and called him “Al.” She had fallen into Tijuana through various twists of fate. She would commute to San Diego to work in a department store and then come home. All day I was in this house with the Mexican ladies, so I learned Spanish first. How heartbreaking it must have been to my mother to have this little baby who couldn’t say words back to her in English. When we left Tijuana, we were trapped in the barrio because of financial struggles, and my Mexican father was adamant that I was a Mexican: he wanted me to be the perfect Mexican, which I was not. He always spoke Spanish to me, forced Mexican music on me; we watched the Tijuana channel on our TV with the rabbit ears. He was a macho man.

My mother was this intellectual arty person who read, read, read. And she won the war. I think they had declared a war over my ethnicity and my intellect—and she won with books. The first author I was exposed to was Dickens. She would read to me—and I had no idea what she was talking about, but it was such a marvel of language. I think weirdly enough Dickens made me become a writer. I would fall asleep listening to her lulling voice, and sometimes she would turn British with her accent: I could see waves in the ocean made of words. That’s how I would fall asleep—these words flowing to me. When she got me my junior library card, every weekend I could be a rich man and bring home fourteen books or whatever the limit was. So, she won through literature.

My mother was this intellectual arty person who read, read, read. I think they had declared a war over my ethnicity and my intellect—and she won with books.

Shea : I’m curious about the fact/fiction alchemy. You reference the “terrible crash that ended my mother’s service.” So, did what happened to Irene in the novel—to some extent at least—happen to your mother?

Urrea : The entire arc of the novel follows closely in her steps. By extrapolating and fictionalizing, I tried to encompass as much as I could, using these women as witnesses for the reader, of what was going on. [In this case], my mother and another woman were in the Alps at night in the dark in a blackout, the headlights taped down to little slits. I don’t know who was driving, but they hit a bomb crater and flipped off a cliff. My mother awoke to her own screams, kneeling on her hands and knees in mud in the dark in her own blood. She could see the burning jeep down the mountain. She would only say, “We never found that girl” who had been with her in the truck. I thought it must be Jill, but it wasn’t. Yet that whole scene in the novel was exactly as she told it to me. They had been warned that there were Germans patrolling the mountains, so when she saw these men lighting up the area with their flashlights, she assumed they were Germans. That’s a direct quote from her: the guy who shone the light in her face said, “Jesus, it’s a goyl,” so she thought not only were they Americans, but they were from New York City! They did climb the mountain with her on their backs and walked miles to a MASH unit.

That scene with the burned soldiers also happened; in fact, it was her last experience in the war. She was then sent off to a reconstructive surgery rehab. I was probably in my twenties when she told me, “I have never lived a day of my life without pain.” She meant that physically, but I suspect she also meant it in a deeper metaphysical way.

Shea : We have to talk about Handyman. He’s pretty much a dreamboat, as people would have called him in that era: he’s a fighter pilot (the Maverick of his day), tough, daring, yet tender. Could you talk about where he came from?

Urrea : For a while now, I have helped nonprofits raise funds, and one way is I offer to give naming rights to a character in one of my novels for a donation. I was at Fishtrap in Oregon, a wonderful writing conference, and I was the emcee for a raffle. People were bidding $15, maybe $25, until a gentleman named Mike Andrews stood up and said “$1,250.” I asked, “Are you sure?” and he said he was. Afterward, he handed me a piece of paper folded up with the name Hans Enricus. I asked what I should know, and he said: “This is my grandson. He is severely disabled, he’s autistic, he’ll never walk, he’ll never talk. I would like you to show me what his life could have been.” I knew this had to be a major character, not a walk-on.

Even now, as I tell you, it makes me misty-eyed. I wondered how I could honor that request. As fate would have it, after we had been with Jill for several years, she showed us her personal album with the most meaningful photos. There was a picture of my mother doing her Greer Garson thing with this damned GI leaning on her possessively and kind of smirking at the camera. I looked at Jill and demanded “Who is this?” She smiled. “Ah, that’s Jake.” I asked, “Who the heck is Jake?!” Jill leaned in and said, “Louis, it was the war. We all had men.” Suddenly Mom’s full humanity showed up. Her lover—are you kidding me? Later on, in Jill’s papers, one of the soldiers had written about the lieutenant colonel, a hotshot fighter pilot named Jake. I gave Hans Enricus as full a life as I could.

But I always like to subvert some of the macho stuff. So, I thought, what if we make Jake a thoughtful man, a singer, the kind of sweet-hearted man who was doing this duty, but what he really wanted to do was go back home to the Walhalla Mountains?

After my mom died [in 1990], I had to go home because she left everything we had ever owned in this house [in San Diego]. I was going through all the stuff. We had these hollow doorknobs from the 1940s with little brass round plugs on flanges, and the one on her bedroom door had fallen off. When I tried to put it back, I found a picture of this handsome man folded up in the doorknob. In the door of the other bedroom that she often used, I found another picture of this man. I knew my mother felt he was there to protect her somehow from all the awful wraiths and shadows. But I’ll never know who that was.

Shea : A nosy question maybe, but I’m a romantic . . . you’ve commented that your parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and here you—the son of that marriage—imagine for your mother a wonderful, passionate relationship in this idyllic setting of Cannes in the midst of war. Is that part of your gift to your mother?

Urrea : She needed respite, sanctuary. She was beset upon by devils and terrible memories, and I don’t think even childhood was good for her. There was a reason why she spent most of her time on Staten Island hiding in the woods. I once had something painful happen to me, and when I went to tell her, she said, “Do you think the worst things in the world didn’t happen to me?” She had this core of iron in her. Still, I think she enjoyed my youth because my friends adopted her. They all called her “Ma” and were always driving her places. She couldn’t bake a cake if you paid her a million dollars, so my female friends would bake me a birthday cake and bring it to our home for Ma to give to me. She loved the guys and took in my friends, musicians who stayed with us on and off. She enjoyed the uproar, hubbub, and the humor. I think maybe part of her was reliving the best of the GIs.

Shea : Seeing your daughter, Chayo, getting to know your mother as you were researching and writing this novel must have been both powerful and immensely gratifying. You were getting to know your own mother in many ways at the same time as your daughter was getting to know her grandmother. How did that feel?

Urrea : It was so touching. Chayo was very close with Jill, who just loved her. I can’t help but think now that she must have seen my mom in Chayo. My mom was 5’3”, Chayo 5’2”; my mother’s eyes are hazel, Cindy’s green, mine blue, and Chayo’s green and blue mixed almost look like my mother’s eyes. One of the most haunting moments of my life was finally going to Staten Island, where I had never been, and when we drove to Richmond Village with the hills, oak trees, and old houses, I suddenly saw my mom. We started to walk with Chayo in front of me, following my mother’s path to the water. It was such a shock to realize that they [the beloved deceased] are gone, yet somehow they are never gone. My daughter, who never met her grandmother, could walk down the same path as she did, where she might have sat to read Green Mansions or Edna St. Vincent Millay poems. At that point, I was super thankful I was working on this book.

Shea : Female friendship seems to be the heart of the novel. Dorothy and Irene become “the sisters,” and Dorothy declares to Irene that they are each other’s family. At one point you write, “Irene and Dorothy were like an old married couple, their outbursts and rhetorical questions a form of connection. A nest of self where they felt safe.” These women may be enormously different people, but they influence and support—and love—each other. We rarely see this in war stories when it comes to women. Despite the horrors of war, or maybe because of it, it’s the men who become that band of brothers. How deliberately did you build that theme, if you will, of women’s friendship?

Urrea : It’s funny that you say this, because Cindy started talking about this very thing. She said that I completely changed the formula of war novels by talking about the female experience of combat, which is different. All the usual tropes start to seem antique. You want to do justice to these two women you love, because I was so taken with the dynamics of that relationship. The third woman in the truck is represented by shifting characters because I wanted it to be clear that this friendship between Irene and Dorothy couldn’t be derailed. They were partners. I’m very happy that the friendship comes across to people. I’ve been so insanely blessed by the women who’ve read the book and contacted me. I feel that maybe I’ve gotten it at least as close to right as I could. I feel that I have been able to leave both women a testimonial that they deserve.

Shea : One of the things I admired about the novel is that you set both Dorothy and Irene up as young women who are looking for a new life. One might even say that they join the Donut Dollies to escape sad and limited lives. Yet through their patriotism and admiration for the GIs, they discover a courage in themselves that they might never have realized they had. Were you thinking of those conflicting or contrasting motivations as you brought these two characters to life?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Joseph Campbell, wondering who will write the heroine’s journey, a new paradigm.

Urrea : I’ve been thinking a lot about Joseph Campbell, wondering who will write the heroine’s journey, a new paradigm. My mother was escaping a “bad” romantic relationship: all I ever heard was that he physically hurt her. Her uncle and cousin had been heroes in World War I, so she had grown up with these former soldiers. One of her uncles, a handsome Tyrone Power–looking young man, killed himself. The nightmares of the war would not leave him in peace. Although that haunted my mom, she was quite patriotic and wanted to serve, yet she was also fleeing all of it—the family, the milieu, this terrible relationship.

Jill was very close to her twin brother, Jack. The family lore was that Jack came first and Jill came tumbling after! When Jack went off to war, she wanted to go with him, but all there was for her was administrative stuff or being a nurse, and she wanted to go to the front lines with Jack. She was a farm girl who knew how to drive trucks and tractors. When she found this Clubmobile corps—the Red Cross, front lines, big truck—she signed up. That’s how these two women met—one fleeing from something, one fleeing to something.

When they were trapped in the siege of Bastogne, Jill found out that her brother was in command of the next town north. She went to see him, and they had a wonderful reunion. While she was coming back, the town was shelled, and he was killed the next morning. That changed everything for her forever. I promised I would visit his grave in Europe and put flowers on it for her, but I haven’t done that yet.

Urrea : There’ve been a number of World War II novels featuring lively young women having an adventure, and they all have the same cover: a woman seen from behind, her skirt kicking up. The first cover was a little bit that way. I didn’t want that because I didn’t think that picture captured what I was trying to get at. It was interesting, though, because when I first showed the galleys on Facebook with the current cover, a couple of angry women wrote about “another dismembered woman on a book cover.” I wrote back saying, no, she is not dismembered; she is turning away from atrocity, hiding her face from the overwhelming shock, which is the shadow around her. The more I looked at that cover, the more I realized that Lucy Kim had captured the soul of the story. I’ve grown to love it just in terms of the imagery. Try as we might, we can never really know Irene or Dorothy. Both are guarding shadows. The delicacy of the woman’s neck as she looks away from all that is behind her captures the vulnerability of Irene. I think my mother would like it.

Shea : The title echoes a popular song first recorded by the blues singer known as Leadbelly. Were there several iterations to get to that title?

I was thinking of Jill’s anger at Tom Brokaw writing The Greatest Generation with no mention of the women. She wanted a band of sisters!

Urrea : You’re always thinking about it. I wanted the title to have resonance, to be instantaneously evocative of the times. Of course, my mother’s name was Phyllis Irene. In the epigraph, there’s a line of a song by Joan Manuel Serrat, a Spanish balladeer, from his beautiful song called “Irene”: “I cannot understand why you can pass by and not see her.” That’s really the point of the book—the meta-message—women who are forgotten or ignored. How could you not have seen these people? I was thinking of Jill’s anger at Tom Brokaw writing The Greatest Generation with no mention of the women. She wanted a band of sisters!

“Good Night, Irene” is just a great song. So what would Handyman do to try to comfort his lover Irene? He surprises her by singing this. The military then was very segregated, and Black soldiers had a hard time, but this guy, a musician himself, plays with Black musicians. I was trying to break all the stereotypes that I could, and in that way honor people in the book. So, for example, Captain Walker is based on Frank X. Walker, the first Black poet laureate of Kentucky and founder of the Affrilachian Poets. I thought it was interesting to ask whether when you’re under fire, you’re in trouble, if it really matters that somebody is Black, Indigenous, or Mexican? You’re there to keep one another alive. I try to amass good spirits in the book, and I represent people as best I can. Not to get political, but I felt that amidst the rise of super angry, semifascist vibes in America, it was time to gently suggest this is what America is about.

Shea : I’m mindful of not giving away the ending, but it’s so—right. How did you get there?

Urrea : I realized the book was getting kind of long, and I wouldn’t be able to write an exegesis of those elder years, so I worked hard at condensing it. I was helping a friend who was writing a mystery—and I love mysteries. I told him, “I stole from you because I realize you guys often give us a Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope: we think we know what the end is, then boom, you hit us with something else.” I thought how much fun it would be to take a weird turn at the end of my book. I’d have to trust my readers not to give up, I’d have to keep it interesting enough to make readers say “what?” until you realize there’s a short but very accelerated version of the novel you’ve just read. I was also writing a book I wanted my mom to like, so there was no way I was going to write some hopeless downer, social-realist, doesn’t-it-suck-to-be-old ending.

Shea : You’ve said that through this novel, you finally gave your mother a happy ending. So what would you like to say to her (that is not in this book) if she were here right now?

Urrea : I probably would tell her, “Mom, I did the best I could.” I was so frustrated during her life because so much of what I tried didn’t work; I could not penetrate all the pain, sorrow, and regret. But I think the best thing about me is the art I’ve been able to make. So I was able to take the best I could do for my mom. Then, I’d probably apologize for the sex!

Shea : On that note, Luis, many thanks again for writing this wonderful book.

Editorial note: This conversation took place over Zoom.

An Excerpt from Good Night, Irene

by Luis Alberto Urrea

The difficult job began in the afternoons, when everyone watched for returning missions. The base became tense, silent, with all eyes on the sky as they waited to see who didn’t come home. They searched for smoke trailing across the sky, which signaled B-17s missing engines. These planes were uncanny. They could fly with huge holes blown through their fuselages. They could fly with half a tail. They could fly with pieces of their wings missing. Everyone had heard the legend about the Fortress that flew back across the English Channel with no cockpit – no front end at all. A ghost ship. And the story was that it had landed itself.

They all waited deep into the night. More than once, Irene and Dorothy never got back to their billet. They waited until sunrise and began the morning service all over again. On those days, in spite of their efforts to buck each other up, they burned their hands and scalded themselves and cursed, but still called each guy “honey,” or “brother,” or “babe.” By noon they would be asleep on the floor.

It had not taken them long after arriving at Glatton to understand that their service was not truly about the donuts and coffee. They had seen enough boys fail to return from a morning flight. The real service was that their faces, their voices, their sendoff might be the last blessing from home for some of these young pilots. The enormity of this trivial-seeming job became clearer each day.

Editorial note: Excerpted from the book Good Night, Irene , by Luis Alberto Urrea, copyright © 2023. Available from Little, Brown, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Renee H. Shea , formerly professor of English at Bowie State University in Maryland, interviews contemporary authors for World Literature Today . She frequently contributes to Poets & Writers , most recently “Hope and Terror,” a profile of Julia Phillips (July/August 2024), and “Alone Together,” a profile of Edwidge Danticat (September/October 2024). She is currently doing a series for the American Book Review on “The Laureates.” The initial interview with J. Drew Lanham, poet laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina, appeared in the fall 2023 issue. She also coauthors English language arts textbooks for Bedford, Freeman & Worth.

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