Olga Almost Dies Dreaming for Conditional Love | Book Review

Xochitl Gonzalez’s debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming, tells the story of 39-year-old Olga Acevedo, a well-known New York wedding planner, and her older brother, Prieto, a congressman who’s been in the closet for far too long.

Gonzalez explores contemporary Puerto Rican identity, in and out of a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. She sheds light on historic colonialism re-imaged as American capitalism. And, through Prieto, she touches on queer struggle and HIV-stigma.

But, above all, the novel is grounded in Olga’s search for unconditional love, and how she must renounce false illusions of love to find it. First, she gives up her business. Then, her high-status lover. And, finally, the mother who abandoned her.

[Warning! Spoiler alert!]

Conditional Business Success

The story begins at the upscale Henderson wedding, Olga at the helm of the event. Gonzalez writes:

The telltale sign that you are at the wedding of a rich person is the napkins.

… and while Olga Isabel Acevedo’s job required her to worry about all of these elements and more, the present moment found her primarily concerned with the napkins. Mainly, how she could steal them when the party was over.

Olga’s cousin, Mabel, was to be married, and she had reluctantly agreed to help her—particularly with the napkins.

Olga did not see this as a theft as much as an equalization of resources: Mrs. Henderson had aggressively accumulated too much of something while her family had acutely too little. At the Henderson wedding, despite all the time and energy spent discussing, procuring, pleating, and angling these napkins, they would go unnoticed. But at Mabel’s, like a black Chanel suit in a sea of knockoff Hervé Léger bandage dresses, they would stop people in their tracks.

Here, Olga stands both at her corner of the American establishment and on the shoulders of her Puerto Rican heritage. She uses her birthplace, her Ivy League education, and her natural knack for business to make money and maintain status. And she uses her leg-up to uplift her people when she can—like with napkins.

So, as she sees it, she doesn’t give up who she is. She just embodies a specific version.

Later in the story, after Hurricane Maria devastates Puerto Rico, Olga is filled with rage—against American leaders’ inaction and the public’s lack of nuanced understanding. On air (she occasionally hosts a televised wedding segment), she decides it’s time to be honest.

“People are suffering—starving for food—but still being penalized with taxes on produce and other goods just for living on an island the U.S. government stole in the first place! That’s criminal!”

Almost on cue, the calls start to come in from clients. They don’t think Olga is the right fit to plan their wedding. They saw her on TV, and they sympathized with her, but they don’t agree.

Suddenly, it becomes clear to her that the success of her business is a conditional success. To maintain herself at the top, Olga would need to continue a façade that, this time, meant ignoring or whitewashing the injustices her people faced.

So, she gives her business away.

Conditional Lust

A few chapters in, we meet Dick Eikenborn, the father of one of Olga’s difficult brides, a man in the midst of leaving his wife. Dick and Olga’s relationship escalates on board his private jet to the vineyard outside the city, where the wedding will be held.

Within fifteen minutes after takeoff their physical desire for each other was mutually understood. […] By the time they landed, they had made a plan for him to join her for a nightcap at her hotel once the others had gone to bed.

Over the course of the narrative, their intimacy remains casual, yet constant. Dick longs to make Olga a permanent fixture in his life, despite the culturally insensitive comments his friends make about her less-aristocratic upbringing. Olga, on the other hand, enjoys Dick’s company but does not believe they will mesh well long-term. If she moved in with him, she would officially enter New York’s most elite circles, but she valued her independence more.

That said, Olga does accept Dick’s invitation to an event in the Hamptons (a client’s wedding she hoped to book). Amidst cocktails and mingling, a hired server drops a tray, and Olga naturally bends down to help. Dick doesn’t like that.

       “I brought you here as my guest and you were off acting like a maid, in front of all of my friends.”

       […]

       “That embarrassed you? That embarrassed you. Okay. Well, you know who didn’t find it embarrassing? The hostess! There is no way I don’t get hired for Laurel’s daughter’s wedding.”

       “Well, that’s exactly my point! This was a party, not an audition. You acted like a maid and now you’ll be hired as one.”

It’s here Olga realizes that Dick’s devotion to her is conditional. Once again, she puts up a façade to fit into the world he belongs to. And she didn’t want that. (Besides, she’d recently met Matteo, a fellow Brooklyn native—and pretty cute.)

After having quasi-reconciled, Olga returns to Dick’s apartment with a professional favor to ask, at the request of her revolutionary mother down in Puerto Rico. Dick perceives her return as the start of their relationship anew. So, when Dick understands that Olga means business, he can’t accept it. He can’t accept all the ways she doesn’t fit the box he imagines for her. And, in the style of European and American colonialism, he rapes her.

Her Mother’s Conditional Love

As kids, Olga and Prieto would sit on a hill and share their dreams with the Statue of Liberty, standing in the distance. Prieto didn’t dream of becoming a politician, nor did Olga dream of becoming a wedding planner. No. They dreamed of finding the love that, at the time, linked their parents so beautifully. But that love didn’t last. Their father died from drug addiction, and their mother, Blanca, abandoned them to lead a revolution in Puerto Rico—or Borikén, the island’s original name.

So, for the rest of her life, Olga dies dreaming for a love from a mother that never shows up. Until the end, when Blanca needs something.

She enlists Olga to return to Dick’s, to cajole him into making a business deal with her growing revolutionary group in Puerto Rico. Olga, so desperate to appease her mother, even years after she left, agrees. And, not only is she assaulted as a result, her mother never reaches out to ask what happened.

Here, at this moment, Olga makes her most ultimate realization—that her mother’s love was always conditional. Manipulative.

So, she abandons her mother, like her mother did her. Instead, she chooses herself. She chooses Brooklyn. She chooses Matteo, because she really likes him, and she tells him the truth.

Each story, each sentence she put out into the world allowed her insides to resume their proper place, reclaiming the space as its own. And when she was done, for a moment, she lay there, appreciating the freedom to fully breathe and relearning the beat of her own heart.

So, unlike Gonzalez’s book title, Olga doesn’t die after all, just the dreams of making conditional love unconditional. She replaces those illusions with a better sense of her own life, and the love she deserves.