It was just a news story that never could break through-not even after Hurricane Maria. 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 clear they were sort of longing to tell one woman’s story. 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. I had no interest in writing a memoir by then. People really responded to the themes, but basically told me it was a book.
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’. commercially – I was intimidated by fiction. When I first started writing – creatively vs.
Xochitl acquaints me with them, “It was sort of three different ideas that one day, very clearly converged. However, these aspects, slowly and surely, begin to assume their space in the background as the more urgent concerns take centrestage. With its opening chapter on the beautiful expensive napkins used in elite weddings, capitalism, consumerism, materialism and elitism infect the narrative. Although it is the very notion of being rich and successful the author endeavours to problematise for her readers. Xochitl’s protagonist Olga is a successful wedding planner for New York’s elite and is rich and successful. However, it is not about the lack of it but of the various ideologies behind it, most prominently, that of the American Dream. Naturally, money is a rather important concern of the narrative. ‘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.
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