Olga Dies Dreaming Xochitl Gonzalez

‘Olga died waiting for a five dollar raise’, says a line from the poem ‘Puerto Rican Obituary’ by Pedro Pietri, from where the title of Xochitl Gonzalez’s extraordinary debut novel, ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’ is taken. Naturally, money is a rather important concern of the narrative. However, it is not about the lack of it but of the various ideologies behind it, most prominently, that of the American Dream. Xochitl’s protagonist Olga is a successful wedding planner for New York’s elite and is rich and successful. Although it is the very notion of being rich and successful the author endeavours to problematise for her readers.

With its opening chapter on the beautiful expensive napkins used in elite weddings, capitalism, consumerism, materialism and elitism infect the narrative. However, these aspects, slowly and surely, begin to assume their space in the background as the more urgent concerns take centrestage. Xochitl acquaints me with them, “It was sort of three different ideas that one day, very clearly converged. When I first started writing – creatively vs. commercially – I was intimidated by fiction. So, I went to Bread Loaf with an essay about being abandoned by my activist mother as a kid so she could go out and ‘save the world’. People really responded to the themes, but basically told me it was a book. I had no interest in writing a memoir by then. But, in time I found the courage to write some fiction and was scratching out some stories about upwardly mobile Latinas – mainly Puerto Rican - living in a very different Brooklyn than the one they grew up in. It was clear they were sort of longing to tell one woman’s story. Finally, I had been for years extremely frustrated by the situation in Puerto Rico and that we have a colony in contemporary times. It was just a news story that never could break through—not even after Hurricane Maria. I one day was reading this book ‘The Battle for Paradise’ by Naomi Klein about disaster capitalism and listening to Alynda Segarra’s album The Navigator while commuting and I realised that, if I borrowed just enough biography from myself, I could weave a pretty entertaining, hopefully beautiful story that would personalise both; one version of a contemporary Latin experience, as well as the real world emotions and experiences of gentrification, colonialism and resilience. I ran out of the train to get a napkin to scratch the ideas out.”

It is never easy to compose a narrative with so many ideas at play and Xochitl does so remarkably through the use of her protagonist, Olga. Olga’s characterisation is a tremendous literary accomplishment. “I would say she is very Old Brooklyn,” the author tells me. “Loyalty, spreading love - that’s more than a Biggie lyric. It’s really how people who are from here so often are. Is there something that’s not that hard for me to do that will make a huge impact on your day? Tell me and I’ll try and do it. She grew up with that value system. There’s some bits of her that maybe are spiteful. Tiny acts of revenge. There are massive moments where Olga feels like she is a terrible person, where she feels that she is neither succeeding at ‘home’ with her family because her time is so devoted to her economic pursuits but her ambitions in that arena leave her feeling emotionally empty. And she’s obviously failing against her mother’s value system. In trying to enact these little revenges or feel tiny moments of alleviation of guilt or whatever, she has some peccadillos, but really, the issue is she is not terrible, she is lonely.”