Literature / Olga Dies Dreaming

Does she die in her sleep?

Olga Dies Dreaming is a 2022 novel by Xochitl Gonzalez. It became a New York Times bestseller in January 30, 2022. Creator/Hulu ordered a pilot for a screen adaptation, starring Aubrey Plaza, Ramon Rodriguez, Jesse Williams, with Wanda De Jesus. Gonzalez wrote the script and served as executive producer.

The novel tells the story of siblings Olga and Pedro "Prieto" Acevedo, from a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. She is an ambitious wedding planner for the wealthy. He is a Congressman coping with the backlash of voting in favor of a controversial piece of legislation and keeping his true self secret. Both of them wrestle with their identities and the legacy from their estranged radicalized mother. The arrival of Hurricane Maria brings up all sorts of issues for them as individuals and as siblings.

Tropes present in this work.

• Abusive Parents: Of the emotional type, as perpetrated by Blanca via her letters. When Prieto and Olga study all of them, they realize that she has been trying to distort how they perceived their other relatives who actually loved them and were there for her.
• Author Avatar: Olga is a semi-fictional version of the book's author Xochitl Gonzalez. Both are (or in the author's case, was) wedding planners of Puerto Rican descent, with the slight difference being that the author is of mixed Puerto Rican and Mexican descent.
• The Beard: After having dinner with the Selby brothers, who make it clear they will be happy to out him to the gay-unfriendly neighborhood he represents in the City Council, Prieto marries a nice neighborhood girl and fathers a daughter. It is not enough to make his real self go away.
• Berserk Button:
  • For Olga, Dick hits it at the party they attend at the Hamptons, when Olga sees a friend of hers who is working at the party take a faceplant while serving drinks. She helps him stand up, comforts him and directs the staff into cleaning the mess. This humiliates Dick, who accuses her of embarrassing him by acting like a maid. She tells him to go fuck himself. As it turns out, her own mother had earlier on accused her of acting like a maid for rich white people by being a wedding planner instead of following her mother's path.
  • For Prieto, Olga hits it when she tells him about Jan, who was HIV-positive, killing himself and his partner Christian needing a place. She shares the tale about how half of Jan's family didn't "know" about him being gay (meaning they knew but did not talk about it) and makes it clear that he is in a Transparent Closet even if nobody in the family talks about it.
• Closet Gay: Prieto spends almost his entire life hiding his sexual orientation from his family. This becomes critical after he is elected councilman. As the Selby brothers remind Prieto, he represents a district that is primarily Latinx and his constituents are not likely to be accepting of him being out.
• Colorism: In one of Blanca's earlier letters, she bluntly states that the majority-white Ivy League school Olga attended only tolerated her because she is "pretty and fair, and speaks in a way that doesn't offend white skin".
• Condescending Compassion: Dick starts out being offended by Olga's rant in the morning show, since she had made plenty money off of him. But after he learns more from her background ("being raised and then abandoned by a radical lunatic", losing her father to AIDS), he starts admiring her more— and even her brother. It actually makes him feel patriotic and proud of the American dream. He remains oblivious to all the trauma and in the end, his goodwill toward her doesn't last.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Not Daddy, Mami; Blanca, Olga and Pedro's mom, left when Olga was 13 and he was 16 to go work on her "causes". She was affiliated to the Young Lords and when that organization dissolved, she went on to join Los Macheteros ("The Machete Wielders"). Prieto has some idea of his mother Blanca's location. For the sake of Plausible Deniability, Olga does not ask her brother.
• A Dick in Name: Dick, Olga's on-and-off boyfriend. While their relationship is thoroughly dysfunctional thanks to both of them, he puts the final nail in the coffin by telling her he humiliated him by assisting when a friend of hers working at a party falls, "You acted like a maid and now you'll be hired as one." That's when she breaks up with him. And that's not even counting when he rapes her later in the book.
• Don't Create a Martyr: After the Time Skip to September 23, 2025, Olga is about to call an anonymous tip on her mother to the FBI about the airport bombing in Puerto Rico, but changes her mind when she thinks it through:

What do you think happens next? She goes quietly? Nah. It'll be guns blazing and she'll be a hero and for the rest of your life you'll have to see her fucking face on murals and T-shirts and have people talk about what a martyr this puta was, and do you really need that shit?
No, she decided. She did not.

• Graffiti of the Resistance: While visiting Puerto Rico, Prieto hears more talk about Los Pañuelos Negros and is shown pictures of their symbol: a woman's face, a beret on her head and her features hidden behind a bandana. Prieto is shocked when he recognizes the woman's face as his mother's.
• Gratuitous Latin: A chapter is titled "Adeste Fideles", like the original title of Christmas song "O Come, All Ye Faithful".
• Heritage Disconnect:
  • When Dick proposes to Olga that they attend an event in Puerto Rico so she can visit her "motherland", she coldly informs her that her motherland is Brooklyn.
  • As for Prieto, his mother questions his identity as Puerto Rican to his face, given his votes.
• Hiding Your Heritage: Zig-Zagged with Reggie King. Starts out with a downplayed version when he changes it from Reggie Reyes (meaning, "Kings") while transitioning from a career producing salsa and freestyle music to mainstream pop and R&B music. While he did not hide his Puerto Rican heritage, he didn't flaunt it either. To make up for it later on, he becomes a highly visible advocate for the decolonization of Puerto Rico and later funds Blanca's efforts.
• I Did What I Had to Do: How Blanca justifies abandoning her children and everything else, including attempting to assassinate the governor and disowning her son as long as it leads to her end goal of liberating Puerto Rico.
• I Have No Son!: Blanca had been proud of Prieto until he voted for the PROMESA legislation and canceled a hearing to audit it. When they get the opportunity to meet in Puerto Rico after decades apart, he wants to show her pictures of his daughter. She is only interested in discussing her work helping the people of Puerto Rico. She tells he is weak in character like his father when it comes to doing what is needed and commands him never to come back to Puerto Rico. She says all this before ordering armed members of La Résistance to escort him to the airport. When she tries to hug him, he pushes her away.

• Hate Sink:
  • Dick. Out of spite for being rejected romantically by Olga, he rapes her and immediately contacts Nick Selby to agree to a proposal that will screw over the people of Puerto Rico.
  • The Selby brothers blackmail Prieto into voting in favor of their Villainous Gentrification of his district. Then they set their sights on the island of Puerto Rico.
• The Mafiya: Olga gets involved with them, starting by simply planning a wedding for a rich Russian family. They provide her with champagne for her to resell. She moves on to ordering extra supplies for a client, then reselling that to another. Igor eventually offers her the opportunity to do money laundering. She declines at first but after she loses almost all her clients after her rant on TV, she ends up taking him up on his offer
• Manipulative Bitch: Despite having abandoned her children Blanca still controls them. Her love for Prieto and Olga is very conditioned to them agreeing blindly with her views. If they don’t, they fall out of favor and she lets them exactly how little she thinks of them. After spending most of her life openly disapproving of Olga's career and life choices, she puts on the charm to convince Olga to get her ex to sell solar panels to her organization, whatever it takes.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Olga was Named After Somebody Famous: Olga Viscal Garriga, political activist and independence advocate.
  • In Pedro Pietri's poem,"Puerto Rican Obituary", one of the Puerto Ricans mentioned who works their lives away is named Olga.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Pedro is reunited with his mother for the first time since she abandoned him and his sister. While her goals of saving the people of Boriken and liberating them from oppression are genuine, she did attempt to assassinate the governor and by her own admission, is willing to try again if necessary. She views having abandoned her children as something she had to do to reach her potential.
• Parental Abandonment: Not only does Blanca walk out on the family when Olga is 13 and Prieto is 16, the clandestine nature of her work allows for only one-way communication in the form of self-righteous letters exalting or criticizing her children's decisions.
• Parental Favouritism: When Prieto is arrested after a protest in Vieques, Puerto Rico, his mother writes him a letter telling how proud she is. In contrast, when Olga is accepted at an Ivy League university, she deplores her daughter's choice. Of course, his Favorite Son status changes when he issues a political vote that goes against his mother's cause.
• Parents as People: Tia Lola, cousin Mabel, and Blanca's friend Karen help Olga and Prieto understand more about their mother's character. Several members of the Acevedo family and even her friend Karen acknowledge that Blanca lacks the mothering gene. As Lola says, while growing up, her sister was never happy unless everybody agreed with her. And as an adult, she cannot accept them unless they do and think like she says, which Lola says is not good mothering.
• Paying for Air: Hurricane Maria causes most of Puerto Rico to lose electric service for months. Solar panels become more popular and eventually, half the island's homes are solar powered. It gets to the point that Corrupt Bureaucrat end up imposing a tax on solar panels. This causes unrest and a movement called "Sol Libre" (free sun).
• Persona Non Grata: Prieto is taken to meet the leader of The Pañuelos Negros, who is his mother. She tells him to stop trying to get aid to Puerto Rico so people can see that they were saved by their own people. And then she has two armed men escort him to the airport and tells him to not come back: "That is the best thing for you, personally, and for Puerto Rico."

• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: On her mother's command, Olga visits Dick (with whom she'd broken up) for dinner with a business proposition: to arrange the sale of a few millions' worth in solar panels to her mother’s organization. He becomes enraged when he learns that she is seeing Matteo and that she is not interested in reuniting with him. He slaps her and rapes her. This sends Olga into a Despair Event Horizon.
• Sell-Out: Olga and Prieto's parents refer to a sellout to their cause as a "lombriz" (Spanish for "worm"). When Prieto votes for PROMESA^note Acronym for the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. Interestingly, "promesa" means "promise" in Spanish., his mother arranges to send him a box of worms to let him know what she thinks.
• Skewed Priorities: When Jan dies by suicide, his boss, event planner Carol is distraught because she will be without his services for several upcoming events. The fact that he had a family and a relationship go completely unmentioned.
• Spicy Latina: This trope is practically invoked by name in the novel:
  • Olga receives a proposal for her own show, described to her in-universe as "Sophisticated New York City planner goes cross-country fixing up people's wacky weddings." However, Executive Meddling leads to production playing up the stereotypical hot-tempered Latina concept and changing the premise to "Spicy Latina will invade the Midwest, take your bland wedding, and SPICE IT UP!". Olga is mortified.
  • Developer Nick Selby refers to her derisively as "your spicy Latin girlfriend" when talking to Dick about his plans for economic development in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.
• Time Skip: The action jumps from 2017 to September 23, 2025. Los Pañuelos Negros, has bombed La Fortaleza (the Governor's Mansion). This is followed by bombings at the airports, seaports, and military outposts in Puerto Rico, thus cutting off Puerto Rico from the rest of the world.
• Tragic AIDS Story:
  • Juan "Johnny" Acevedo, Olga and Prieto's father. He was a Viet Nam vet and became addicted while overseas. Through the Young Lords, he became clean, but ended up relapsing after the organization dissolved. After he gets AIDS, Blanca encourages Olga and Pedro to forget about him, since he couldn't be saved. Prieto did, Olga didn't.
  • Also applies to Jan, who kills himself after learning he is HIV+.
  • Prieto agonizes about where can he get tested without getting recognized as a Congressman.
• Why Can't I Hate You?: A non-romantic example. For all of Olga's rebelliousness to her mother's ideals and eager embrace of making a profit, the minute Blanca approaches Olga for a request, Olga is just moved that her mother contacted her after all this time that she goes on the mission she is assigned: convince her ex-boyfriend, Dick, to sell a large number of solar panels to Los Pañuelos Negros, whatever it takes. Never mind that Olga is currently in a relationship with Matteo and broke up with Dick for a reason.
• Villainous Gentrification: What happens to the neighborhood Prieto represents as councilman. He tries to preserve his neighborhood, but the Selby brothers threaten to out him him to ensure they are not stopped.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Prieto wants to be a person his mother can love. He spends his entire life making choices that will make him worthy. This ends when he meets her in person and realizes that she is more interested in her cause than her children.
  • Olga takes a path (an Ivy League education, her wedding planning business) that her mother disapproves but feels hollow. When her mother approaches her to get Dick to sell her organization a large number of solar panels, she jumps at the chance.
• You Are a Credit to Your Race: Olga and Prieto's grandmother purchased her home from a Mr. Olsen. As fond as he was of her and her children, he would say things like "If only all Puerto Ricans were like your family!" whenever the kids would do even the most basic nice thing.