Xochitl Gonzalez: On Meeting Olga, Thinking Through Character Perspectives, The Issues with the Dominant American Dream, and her Writing Process for "Olga Dies Dreaming"
Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming follows a status-driven Manhattan wedding planner struggling with an absent mother, her Puerto Rican roots, and finding love in the height of Hurricane Maria. Her brother, Prieto, serves as a congressman representing their gentrifying Latinx neighborhood in Brooklyn while dealing with his own secret battles behind closed doors. This ambitious family saga explores the complexity of family, community, and the American dream, Olga learns who she could become as she stands to make it out on the other side of the storm.
I spoke to Xochitl about discovering characters, borrowing from personal experience in writing, the cost of chasing dreams, and the flow of the writing process.
Greer Veon: I really appreciated reading a story about a woman over the age of 30, that’s still figuring things out, and having a chance at love but also having a chance to change some of those things that she wants for herself in life. And as someone who feels like women, and especially those coming-of-age characters can feel like they may have a ‘shelf life’ for that time in their life, it was very interesting to read that and be moved by Olga. Who is this wonderful character, and how did she come about for you in the writing process? Was she the character that then led to the plot of the story? Or vice versa?
Xochitel Gonzalez: Well, that's interesting. I met Olga in a few iterations of short stories that I had been trying out and they were all about like a single woman in her forties living in Brooklyn, that's from Brooklyn, and this idea of “not feeling at home” at home, and she kept having different professions, I would say, but sort of the same personality. Then I knew I wanted to write a novel when I was doing my MFA. I just felt like that was what I wanted to walk out of that experience with. And so I was waiting to hear which program I got into and kind of just thinking of ideas, you know what I mean, and like what would the book be about? I knew I wanted to definitely write about the concept of being single, being forty, and just like living in this place and not feeling at home and like what's home. And so, what ended up happening I would say is that I knew I wanted it to be a bigger book than just that. I knew I wanted to have larger ambitions. Prior to starting working on fiction I toyed with writing a memoir because my mother had been a political activist and I had been a wedding planner and I found the dichotomy of those two things interesting. I decided I didn't really want to write about my own personal life, but one day I just had this idea and I was like, “Well, what if the wedding planner robbed her clients to send her mother money after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico?” It ended up not being that but it ended up turning into something else. And then I was like, I'm going to make her wedding planner and then when I started to think about who she was, I was like, well, she’s like me if I never went to therapy. So then that just helped me kind of leaned into her, but I'd met her already because she was the same character in these other places. You know, she's like single but not where she’s sad about it if that makes sense. She's enjoying it to a certain extent and kind of enjoys her own routine, and at the same time like what is this life and what’s her anchor? So I'd say that I met her first but I didn't want her world to just be her journey. I didn't want the book to just be like her own journey. I think the book was about finding happiness in the traditional way, then finding some peace with herself, and that I think ended up being about when I realized that you can't really find peace in yourself if you never deal with any of the stuff that you've been sweeping under the rug. Then that's kind of how it all came together. I knew more or less where it was going to head. I didn't know the end, per se, but I knew more or less where it was going to head and I knew it was going to tie itself very tightly to Hurricane Maria. Then it just kind of started to come together. Then I thought that she should have a brother and her brother should be in politics. I was just so interested in how children are reactive to who their parents are, right? Will they go either in opposition or in alliance, and I found that interesting to look at by having them be siblings.
GV: Yeah! I really enjoyed the siblings parts. I have a brother myself, so I was interested in not only Olga's point of view, but also Pierto and seeing how they come from that same background with different interests but also how they kind of find that sense of dealing with the stuff under the rug but with each other, and opening to one another.
XG: Yeah!
GV: I did see that you were once a wedding planner and I love hearing about in your background that your parents at one point were activists. Can you say more about what it was like to write about borrowing some from your own personal experiences, but writing for fiction?
XG: It was great. I mean, originally I had wished there was a way to not have. I didn't really want to set out to write a novel about a wedding planner. I think, what I realized is that the things that I'm interested in, like class and frivolity versus seriousness and what we value, I just thought it was the most interesting way and the best profession to give her to be able to seamlessly look and talk about all those things without layering them on. It's an organic part of how she sees the world and what she thinks about the world. Then I knew [the profession], so it was kind of fun to have fun with those details. It was fun to throw all those experiences in there. And then the thing with my parents, I don't really know my parents very well at all because I was not raised by them. I lived with my grandparents from when I was three on, maybe saw my mother once a year and I saw my father, probably a tenth of that, so they're like strangers to me. I just found it interesting that they were like these, like militant socialists and that I spent so much in my career obsessed with material gain. I think I just found that interesting, and I find that interesting in general about my generation. I'm a real Gen-Xer. Our parents fought to break down all these barriers, and then we kind of got there and we're just interested in collecting nice handbags and Manolo Blahniks (Laughs). We’re like, “Okay, thank you for making the American dream accessible to us, and we're going to make it all about material wealth.” So I just thought that that was a cool premise. You know, in the research of the novel, because I did a lot of research, I knew some broad strokes about my parents, my mom especially, but I definitely stumbled into more knowledge of what they had been up to and it's very admirable. I think that's why Blanca is such a challenging character, because she's kind of doing really dope stuff. She's just not a very good mother. (Laughs)
GV: One of the things that was so moving and touching was the discussion of dreams and the values that these different characters have. And like you said, it is interesting that one generation does all of this activism and work and the next generation’s really interested about success maybe in materialistic or status things, especially being the wedding planner and seeing those notions of class and how those weddings are kind of ‘the dream wedding.’ It also felt like a lot of the writing explores kind of the sourness of these dreams. At what cost to chase those dreams or if those dreams change. As far as research, how was it to explore the death of those dreams or the changing of those dreams for certain characters?
XG: That actually is less research-based and much more live based. I have the experience of going from, you know, living with my grandparents who had two GEDs between them, and then going to an Ivy League college, and that was what I was supposed to do. That was seen as the ideal success. Every move that I made towards what I was told was successful, I found myself more alienated and isolated from my family. It wasn't even that, well sometimes there'd be a snobbishness of like, “I don't want to eat that place,” but mainly it would be them not understanding me either. The things that I was told were validators in the way that I was supposed to live that would come across as impressive my family couldn't relate to and they didn't see the value in those things. So I think what is the cost of chasing those dreams if you are not of the dominant culture that decides that those things were worth chasing in the first place? I can say in a Latino family, and in any ethnic family, I almost always find that they are much less interested in you getting a promotion at work and being able to buy a fancy car then they are in whether or not you came to Uncle Chuy’s 50th birthday party, you know what I mean? (Laughs) “Why weren’t you there?” I think time is so valued in large families, like the time that you give to show up and showing up is so valued. How can you show up when you're told you're supposed to spend all of your time accumulating these other things in order to seem like a person of status in dominant American culture?
GV: I really love what you just said about the showing up of the different relationships, because it seems as though that's one of the things that this novel does so well is looking at these different relationships for the human spirit. Family and siblings, but also romantic and friendship, and how in which those effects or the lack of, how that can go on to affect someone. I don't know exactly if that's something that was worked out on the page itself, but I thought that yeah that the book kind of turned everything that we think about some of those relationships and complicated them and kind of turned itself on its head, kind of like dreams, too, and that idea of success.
XG: Yeah, I was just going to say a really funny thing about that. I actually think what’s funny is that I think the one thing that I really think is so important or satisfying in literature if we do it, like it naturally complicates things, is to think through all of the different people that we invent in the world fully. Do, you know what I mean? Because if we really think about their perspective versus just how they may fit into the story, like it makes things complicated pretty organically. (Laughs)
GV: Yeah!
XG: Right? I was just thinking about Lola, the sister, and I had invented who she was. Then I put her in the situation and it's like she has these kinds of complicated relationships to like her own identity and how she views motherhood and how she uses her relationship with her niece and nephew. But that wasn’t plotted as much as like when it came time to write about it. That was who she was. Does that make any sense?
GV: I think that makes total sense. I think one of the things for me as a writer, too, is I think I do similar things where I can think of characters that I almost need to put them in the situation and see how those things unfold and work themselves on the page with each other.
GV: One of things that this book also just stands out is how completely layered, and especially just with the notes of identity and race and going between Brooklyn and then the hurricane hitting Puerto Rico, but also the family saga as well. How long did it take you to write your first draft? Did you do a lot of just letting it work itself out, or did you have to keep an outline because of how many different things were going on?
XG: So the whole first draft is challenging to say because it's misleading in the sense that I started the book in February of 2019, late February. So almost March. I started the book in late February, 2019, and I was working, so I would write in the morning and on the weekends until like August of that year. And then from August until October I was in graduate school, and so I didn't do anything. I didn't even have to teach or anything. So I literally did this night and day. So basically this took me from the end of February to Halloween to finish the first draft. Then I revised, and then I sold it a year to the day that I started it, which was so weird and serendipitous, but like, it's because I'm, it's because I literally did nothing else from like August to October. Then after that, when I was revising, like, that was the beauty of going to graduate school at this phase because I just, it was like I didn't have to adult at all. You know what I mean? I didn't adult at all, by the way. I barely ate, like, I didn’t nutrition; I didn’t exercise. (Laughs) I’d just sit and type and then take quick little catnaps, you know? It was pretty obsessive. So, I hate when I say a year because it's not a year in the normal way, you know what I mean? It's a weird plugging away at it. It was like I kind of had this period of being obsessive. And in the beginning, I kind of took it a chapter at a time. And then when I got maybe fifty pages in, I started mapping it out in fifty-page chunks, if that makes sense? Because I was researching as I went, and that was interesting and I only did it that way because I had the fortune of being in a book club and reading Pachinko and Min Jin Lee came and explained that she ended up writing Pachinko twice because the first time it was like, literally, a research book and then the second time she made it what it is because she made them humans and characters. So I wanted to skip the first step (Laughs) and I was like “Let me not get over-mired in my research. Let me just research what it is that I kind of need to know about in order to like either shape someone’s voice or talk about Prieto and his HIV diagnosis and write that speech that he gives.” Some of [the research] I spend a lot of time with. I knew New York in the 90s during the AIDS and crack era because I lived that, but I needed to then go back and make sure that what I was thinking was factually feasible, but I did that as I went along. So it’s all to say my notebooks are crazy, because it's plot and then like ten, twenty pages of like notes from research, and then plot.
GV: As far as your own writing journey, and making writing at the center of your life, when did you realize that what you wanted to do is to write?
XG: When I turned forty, I decided that like I was going to try and do this. I had owned a business and I walked away from my business and as we got into the process of trying to sell it, I got like a day job because I just thought that would just give me the space to actually write. Which it did, I wasn't wrong. Like, it's like just not having to worry about stirring up your own income and that kind of thing just made such a big difference. Then I went to Bread Loaf and then I decided to apply for MFAs, so it wasn't a very long period between deciding and starting the novel. But, you know, I suspect that that might be slightly uncommon. I'm a very resolute person.
GV: As far as your typical writing day now, what does that look like for you? Is there a process that you follow every day or is it kind of just let's see what happens that day?
XG: Right now my life is like chaos, because I'm in the middle of producing the television adaptation of Olga. So no day is the same. I have no routine. It's like, I have zero routine I’m on, and I'm promoting the book. It's life. I mean, like Christmas I wrote to like six, seven hours a day because of Covid and nobody was having Christmas. So, like there's a good two-week stretch, but then I'm going away next month, so there's no real routine. That's the only thing. I don't know when I'll get back to routine, to be honest. I do it intensely when I can, but like I don't want to say that’s the downside. This phase is not conducive to that. (Laughs)
GV: That's actually really great to hear because I think in a sense for people to know that there are times where there isn't going to be routine. I think we read so much about, “Oh, you should have this routine, and you should have that routine.” I think that there are definitely periods where life is crazy, or especially with all the external things happening with COVID, that yes it’s very hard for some. And I could imagine with writing a show on top of a book tour that that’s definitely understandable.
XG: Yeah, and I’m being pretty gentle with myself about it. Like, I’m going away next month and I’m not doing nearly as much press for the book next month. Part of why I’m going away is I’m trying to remove myself from personal obligations a little bit just to get more of that done. But, I will say when I have the time, my preferred method is to not have anything else to do for several days in a row and just write and barely sleep. Like for like days. That’s my preferred method. But then, you know, obviously like then sometimes you have to do things and so you can't do that, but that's my best writing.
Xochitl Gonzalez has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow and recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Prize in Fiction. She was the winner of the 2019 Disquiet Literary Prize and her work has been published on Bustle, Vogue, and The Cut. She is a contributor to The Atlantic, where her weekly newsletter "Brooklyn, Everywhere" explores gentrification of people and places. Her New York Times bestselling debut novel Olga Dies Dreaming was published in January ’22 by Flatiron Books. Prior to beginning her MFA, Xochitl was an entrepreneur and strategic consultant for nearly 15 years. She serves on the Board of the Lower East Side Girls Club. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, she received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brown University. She lives in her hometown of Brooklyn with her dog, Hectah Lavoe.
About the Interviewer
Greer Veon is a writer based in Conway, Arkansas. Between writing and reading books, she works as an area coordinator for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been featured in ELLE and The New Territory Magazine. Find her at greerveon.com, or on Twitter at @greerveon
