Luis Alberto Urrea’s newest novel, Good Night, Irene (Little, Brown), is a tale of two women who form unbreakable bonds while serving as Donut Dollies on American Red Cross Clubmobiles in World War II. If you don’t know what a Clubmobile or a Donut Dolly is, you’re not alone. Urrea not only illuminates this group of heroic Red Cross volunteers, he also draws from the experiences of his mother, Phyllis McLaughlin Urrea, to lend contextual credence. During our Zoom meeting, Urrea hoisted up a storage chest filled with paper files and photo albums to illustrate the enormity of scrapbooks, clippings, and pictures his mom kept from the war.
Known for lighthearted humor and generous spirit both on and off the page, Urrea is a prolific author who crosses genres with ease. Whether it’s poetry or nonfiction, like the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Devil’s Highway (Little, Brown, 2004), short stories like the Pen/Faulkner nominated The Water Museum (Little, Brown, 2014), or his delicious novels, Urrea’s books consistently deliver the goods. A Guggenheim fellow, Urrea enjoys critical acclaim as well as a loyal audience. Round characters, enticing narratives, and themes of identity and community are emblematic of his work, as is the complicated spectrum of Mexican American culture.
In many ways, Goodnight, Irene is a departure from the themes found in Urrea’s other books. A historical novel that highlights his mother’s experience, the novel is a story of adventure, love, war, and friendship near the front lines of World War II Europe. Irene and Dorothy, two women from entirely different backgrounds, enlist in the Red Cross to work on Clubmobiles, traveling coffee-and-donut trucks that provide soldiers with a little taste of home. Drawing from real-life events and history, many that his mother and her friend, Jill, remembered clearly, it’s an incredibly believable story of endurance and triumph, paying homage to the real Clubmobile women—volunteers who were recognized as the foremost women in battle in World War II.
During our Zoom conversation, Urrea often credited his wife, Cindy, “my Cinderella, my partner in crime,” as the woman who joined him in researching and compiling this labor of love.
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The Rumpus: This is the first time I’ve read about Clubmobiles and Donut Dollies. I love how Dorothy and Irene shouted, “Don’t call us Dollies!”
Luis Alberto Urrea: We actually made Don’t call me Dolly! pins for the book tour. There were a hundred and twenty women who worked these Clubmobiles, nicknamed “Donut Dollies.” They had to be at least twenty-seven years old, three women to a truck, and off they went to learn how to drive it. They were trained to do a lot of stuff, functional in many ways.
They were trained to make coffee and those awful donuts, but they also had to learn things like how to wear a gas mask because they were on the front lines. They were also trained to do things to make the boys feel at home, like play board games and card games, but to lose those games in such a way that the boys wouldn’t think they were throwing the game. That was their duty, they were there to keep the boys as happy as best they could, and that’s what they did.
This is one of the weirdest things I found in my research: they were trained to forget where they were so that they weren’t a liability to any of the men. If they were captured by Nazis, they didn’t really know where they were going or what their orders were. When they were driving around, they were just told, “Go back a hundred miles and you’ll find some men.” So, they were kept out of the loop of a lot of it.
They were trained to be everybody’s sister, cousin, or even their mom. The trainers would say, “You might be their sweetheart, but not their lover!” But of course, there were always romances that happened.
Rumpus: Their history is fascinating! Why is it that Goodnight, Irene is the first I’ve read about them?
Urrea: My wife, Cindy, had not heard about them, either. When we first started talking about this, I was telling her, “You know my mom was a Donut Dolly in the war.” Cindy said, “What’s that?” I said, “Come on, everybody knows about the Donut Dollies in World War II, right? The Clubmobiles that drove into soldier camps to serve donuts and coffee for the troops under fire?” She had never heard of them.
Not only is Cindy my partner in crime, but she’s a very well-read woman, a newspaper woman who reads more serious books than I do. I couldn’t believe she didn’t know who these women were. After researching, she was motivated: “Women war heroes! Women war heroes!” We started doing research together, traveling to Europe, going to World War II museums. This is what happens once you unleash your reporter wife on it.
Rumpus: It was the 1940s, so cultural norms were different. Irene and Dorothy, the two main characters in the book, had to comply with traditional ideals of femininity, but they seem like empowered women living emancipated lives, right?
Urrea: Yes. That’s why my mother joined the Red Cross. She was fleeing a stifling, dysfunctional family and an abusive first marriage. She said, “To hell with all that! I’m gone!” and she left New York to go to Europe. Her friend, Jill, was from the Midwest, she volunteered for different reasons, and when they met, they felt like they had suddenly been set free. Of course, they were answerable to officers, but really? They were answerable to the truck and maybe the third partner in the truck. It was exciting, uplifting, and liberating, up to a point, but it got worse, and more terrifying. They went into places and got more than they bargained for. It’s an incredible legacy, one that helped me understand my mom.
Rumpus: Your mother inspired the titular character of this book, Irene. Growing up, did she ever tell you stories about the things she did in the war?
Urrea: Not really. I had no idea. I’m glad this is The Rumpus because we can talk about real stuff here. I have been plagued by a growing sense of horror that I’m trotting out my mother’s trauma. Everybody wants to know about the trauma: “Tell us, how bad was it?” Part of me started to feel like I’d been betraying her because she wasn’t all trauma. However, as time progressed, trauma won out, and she became more isolated and difficult.
When I was growing up, I didn’t know anything about my younger mom. I was born in Tijuana, raised in San Diego, and everybody in my family, including my extended family, was Mexican—Spanish-speaking Mexicans—and my mom was the only (Anglo) American. It didn’t occur to me that she never connected with her family back East. She had this fantasy world of what it was like: wonderful New York, wonderful Long Island. She had sophistication, spoke with that classic East Coast wit, and always called me “Dear Boy.” I knew her family had some money and were friends with John Steinbeck and Albert Einstein. From where I was, in San Diego, National City, or Tijuana, it didn’t seem possible. So, in some sense, my mom was kind of a fictional character already.
I remember her nightmares, crying, weeping, and sometimes yelling. I learned the hard way not to awaken her from those nightmares. If you tried to touch her, she was out the window. In terms of combat veterans, this is not uncommon. With all that being said, my mom had little flashes of Irene. I remembered when little bits slipped out now and she was very joyous. But I didn’t know enough about that side of her, so the stuff I was writing seemed inauthentic. During this process, I wrote the book at least five different times. It kept changing.
Rumpus: Until you met the woman your mother called Darling Jill, right?
Urrea: Yes, Darling Jill! My mother’s best friend. When Cindy and I started looking around, there were no Donut Dollies to be found. It turned out that they were all busy dying themselves. The [American Red Cross] records building that housed everything had burned down, so there were no official records of them.
Then, we found out that Jill, the woman who inspired the character of Dorothy in the novel, the last of the Donut Dollies, the driver of the truck, was alive! Not only was she “not dead,” but she lived ninety minutes away from our house, here in Illinois. Cindy and I wrote a letter to her, and she called the day after she got it. I was too shy to talk to her, but Cindy talked to her, woman-to-woman. She was hilarious. After a while, she asked to talk to me. She said, “I must speak to Louis,”—she called me Louis, she didn’t understand this Luis business—and Cindy gave me the phone. Then, Jill said, “Louis, you must come see me.” I said, “Oh yes, Miss Jill, we’re coming as soon as possible.” She said, “I’m ninety-four. Don’t try to wait till I turn ninety-five, if you know what I’m saying.” I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m already in love with this woman!”
We drove down, and this is where my mother appeared. Jill had a large photograph of my mom on the wall, in her 1940s movie-star glory. She had a Greer Garson look about her,
I was so flabbergasted! I just stared at it. That’s when Jill said the line that got the book going: “I drove the truck; your mother brought the joy.” That day, we looked at the photographs my mother left. My mom’s archives had so many photographs, documents, and journals from that time.
I suddenly saw my mother and those effervescent moments that were a part of her. I knew she had a few of these moments when I was a boy, but I imagined her at twenty-seven, at the top of her game: gorgeous, feeling heroic, serving “the boys.” She was working with this six-foot-one Valkyrie, having fun and adventure. I started seeing my mom, realizing who she really was, back then before all the rough stuff.
So that’s where the book suddenly happened.
Rumpus: What was the most significant way the war changed people?
Urrea: There is a moment before the siege happens when a man, the former mayor, who had been tortured by the SS, begs the women, “Please save my daughter . . .” and they turn him down. They told him, “There’s GI’s everywhere, and there will be people who can help you.” But he kept pleading: “Please, just put her in your truck with the donuts. Just drive her away. They’re going to kill me but you can save my little girl.” That really happened. My mom told me, “We never found that child again.” It was a growing burden of horror that, to me, is really to me a key in that lock of the hidden story.
Rumpus: In this scene, the Donut Dollies drive away quickly, “as if they could outrun their consciences.” They do this a lot when the fighting is fierce. They see a wounded kitten, but they steel themselves and leave it behind. In one scene, they’re having fun, everyone is dancing, there’s a talent show, and then bam! jet engines are roaring above, shaking the Clubmobile, and they’re off to take cover, then serve “the boys.”
Urrea: The main importance of their lives at the time was the well-being of the boys, the soldiers. The Donut Dollies were there to serve them. Yes, they were part of the American Red Cross, but they were for the boys. Serving them brought them joy.
That’s why they couldn’t relax when they saw Patton. Soldiers used to call Patton “Old Blood and Guts,” they would say, “Our blood, his guts!” Patton was a big package to deal with. Jill and Phil knew him. When he shows up in the story, at their donut dugout, he says, “Call me George.” They respond, “Yes, sir, General!” They couldn’t call him George. They couldn’t unwind even if they wanted to.
Rumpus: Then he asks them to follow him to Buchenwald.
Urrea: He really did tell them, “You have to do something for us tomorrow, and it’s not pleasant.” The women thought they were going to a prisoner of war camp. They made ham sandwiches, they were driven up into Buchenwald with ham sandwiches for Holocaust survivors. Later, they thought, “How stupid are we? The survivors couldn’t have eaten ham if they wanted to!” They witnessed some awful stuff. My mother kept all her pictures of that time.
Rumpus: No wonder she had PTSD!
Urrea: Right? She saw this stuff over and over. The details in the book are all chronologically true. Like Irene, my mom flees New York, goes to training in D.C., takes an armada across the sea to England, lands in Liverpool, does her first Donut Dolly job there at the docks, gets assigned to London, takes a train, and it’s bombed. She gets to London and meets a bunch of guys assigned to go to Glatton Air Force Base.
My mom really was taking a bubble bath when the first buzz bomb went overhead. She did land on Utah Beach, drive all through France, liberate Paris with Patton, and was trapped in the Siege of Bastogne. These women were caught in the middle of the Battle of the Bulge and were later acknowledged by the Government as the group of most forward women in combat. If you’ve got that outline already lived, then you have to try to honor it.
I wanted to have markers to let you know that there are real women also. It lends voracity to the fictional women because they are functioning together.
Rumpus: There are letters throughout the book, from soldiers to the Donut Dollies. Are these real?
Urrea: Some are real; others are not, even though they’re modeled after real ones. They provide the understory, as I call it. Some of the love letters, written by the character of Handyman, were not real. My mother didn’t really have any correspondence from people. She isolated herself, so there weren’t very many letters in her belongings at the time of her death.
Jill, on the other hand, maintained a healthy pen-pal relationship with a lot of people, and she saved all the letters. After she died in 2020, at the age of 102 years, she left those letters to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Jill Pitts Knappenberger Archive, which has got some incredible stuff. A lot of the letters in the book come from or are inspired by letters that Jill had. Before Jill died, she opened her own personal photo album to show me. She had a lot of photo albums, but she had one special one with black pages and white ink. It was her little work of art, with pictures of my mom on the Riviera, posing and doing her thing.
I said, “Hey, check out my mom! She really looks like a movie star!” I turned the page, and there’s a dude, some shirtless, lush bastard in black trunks, with his arms around my mother.
I said, “Miss Jill, who is this guy?” She came over, looked at it, then she smiled. “Oh, that’s Jake.” She looked away and smiled. I was outraged. I said, “Jake?! Who is JAKE?” Then, Jill turned to me and said, “Louis, it was a war. We all had men.”
After Jill died, we were going through her archives, and we found a letter from a guy asking about Philly. He wrote, “How is Phil? Is she still head-over-heels for that hotshot pilot Jake?” I had no idea that Jake was that guy. I had already written the romance, and here he really was.
Rumpus: It sounds like Jake inspired Handyman, Irene’s love interest, the handsome pilot who falls for her. Is this how Handyman came to be?
Urrea: Not exactly. Finding Handyman is an interesting story. I always try to put my social activism in league with my publishing life, so I do fundraisers or appearances to help where I can. I often go to Fishtrap, in eastern Oregon. It’s one of my home bases for writing, in Joseph, Oregon, where Chief Joseph from the Nez Perce is buried.
One year, Fishtrap was holding a raffle, as a fundraiser. I donated the chance to name a character in my next book, this novel that takes place during World War II. People were bidding on it: fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty bucks, and then, one gentleman stood up and said, “One thousand two hundred and fifty dollars!”
The moment it was sold, I knew something was going on. I met him, when it was all over, off to the side of the stage. He was a tall gent, white-haired, regional guy. I said, “I can’t believe you just did that! Are you sure? That’s a lot of money.”
He gave me a folded piece of paper, and he said, “This is who I want you to write about.” I opened it and written on the paper was a name: Hans Michael Henricus Vanderwey. I looked at him, and asked, “Is there anything I should know about him?” He said, “That’s my grandson, and he’s severely autistic. They say he’ll never communicate.” He cried and said, “I would like you to show me the life he could have lived.”
At first, I had no idea what to do with that. I thought, “This is the biggest responsibility anybody has ever handed me!” I went to Cindy and said, “Hey, let’s make him Gary Cooper. Let’s make him a hot-shot, Top Gun kind of guy.”
So that’s Handyman. He’s also a kind, tender man. He just started living in the book, and I followed his shenanigans. I often wonder how Grandpa will feel about seeing his grandson’s name in print, especially since Handyman is having all kinds of sex with this Donut Dolly. I asked Cindy if she thought Grandpa would be upset about that, but she said, “No, I don’t think so.”
Rumpus: When people ask me who you write like, I say Dickens because your characters are already fully formed. When I meet them, they’ve been alive for a while.
Urrea: Funny you should say that. The first real book my mother read me was by Charles Dickens. Then Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, followed by The Jungle Book by Kipling. I always say she won the Mexican–American War in my household, by reading to me every night, literature written in English. With that literary trifecta, my mother changed everything.
The writer who really discovered me and trained me was Ursula Le Guin. She took me in when I was a kid, twenty-one years old, and showed me everything. She was astonishing! She said things to me that I’ll never forget. If you go on my website, there’s an essay about her, called “Tolfink Was Here” that you can read. She published my first published story, and she guided me for years and years. We were friends until the day she died.
Rumpus: It makes sense that you have a believable way of writing women like your epic novels Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America, but also Into the Beautiful North, which all have a woman’s perspective.
Urrea: I was raised by mujeres: my grandmother, Mama Lupita, my bowling champion aunt, Tía Irma, and my mother. My cousin and my dad were the only males around, and the women let the two men strut around and act all important. The women fed them and cared for them, but after a while, it was, “Okay, get out of here. We’re running the world now!” In a way, I preferred them to the macho men who made my life a living hell. Women told stories. I learned their language, heard their stories.
Eventually, my own tastes went to Ray Bradbury, which my mother didn’t like. “What? Spaceships and monsters? Dear Boy!”
Rumpus: Then, Ursula Le Guin started feeding into you.
Urrea: Oh, yeah! She definitely hooked a locomotive to the train.
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Author photo by JP Best
