by Corrine Watson
October 26, 2021
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC with her baby dragon, Ophelia. Corrine enjoys writing speculative fiction that hovers on the edges of reality and dares to dip into the mysterious. Keep up with Corrine on Twitter @CorrineWatson6
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva; Astra House; 192 pages; $23.00
Dreaming of You by Melissa Lozada-Oliva is a wild ride. This epic fictional saga told through verse explores identity, celebrity, and culture through the lens of a woman on a journey to self-discovery. Lozada-Oliva’s experimental, hybrid prose is dark and witty in a brutally honest way, holding up a mirror to both society and herself.
This auto-fictional story follows Melissa, whose identity crisis inspires her to perform a séance to resurrect the Tejana popstar Selena Quintanilla. Melissa is a Latinx poet living in New York who wants to be seen, to love and be loved, and find something to fill the empty spaces she perceives in herself. She feels in a rut, both romantically and professionally, and tries dating to fill the emotional void, but even when she finds love in a new relationship, she feels something is still missing. She has grown up in the shadow of Selena’s murder at the hand of friend and fan club manager, Yolanda Saldivar, and finds herself reflecting on the popstar’s posthumous influence on her life. In her journey to self-discovery, Melissa wonders if she’s spent her entire life trying to fit into a Selena-esqe identity. As she begins to find the form ill-fitting, she comes to realize that as a twenty-some-year-old Latinx creative, she’s been force-fit into the same cultural mold as Selena.
The narration is often interceded by Las Chismosas, ‘the Gossips,’ who give the story a post-modern operatic vibe. Their asides give the story narrative distance and often provide a deeper introspective commentary as they describe the chaos that unfolds. They open the novel to let us know:
“This is a story of mirrors,
or what happens
when you bring the mirror
back from the dead and when
you look in it you see yourself
eating yourself.”
Lozada-Oliva uses this illustration to give life to Melissa’s foils. Melissa’s ‘mirror’ reflects the unholy trinity of Selena’s iconic cultural ghost; the obsessive fan, Yolanda; and Melissa’s shadow self, referred to as She. The reflection Melissa wants to see is Selena, but instead she's haunted by the darker self lurking in the shadows. Yolanda and She come into Melissa’s life when she’s at her most vulnerable, and manipulate Melissa’s desire to be loved. Like the painting in The Picture of Dorian Grey, She is a more grotesque version of Melissa, described as, “a photo album dedicated to humiliation,” and represents the things she fears and hates about herself while Yolanda reflects the toxic line between love, obsession and fear of abandonment. As each of these entities come into her life, Melissa finds herself overshadowed by the magnitude of their presence and drifting farther into obscurity as others fill the spaces she once consumed.
The book is titled after Selena’s posthumous record and feels like a tribute to the Tejana pop star and the fans who loved her. While never explicitly taking a stance, the novel does beg the question of what do celebrities owe their fans as Lozada-Oliva illustrates the pitfalls of celebrity devotion when we see how Melissa and Yolanda’s love for Selena is not reciprocated. After resurrecting Selena, Melissa wants to show how she’s been inspired by the pop star’s music by sharing her poetry. But as Selena returns to the land of the living, she can’t help but reclaim her spotlight, leaving Melissa feeling alone and rejected. The novel also uses the impact of Selena’s murder to show the cultural weirdness around celebrity death and how the grief feels personal even though it is directed towards someone who is, essentially, a stranger. Lozada-Oliva explains artists are “able to make the sentiments into mirrors they held up to us,” and the art is our “identity turned into a dust and packaged into a pill we can swallow.” This aptly describes how we often consume content when we see our own identities reflected back to us, and there's a sense of nostalgia in the work we grew up with from the songs we sing in the mirror at thirteen to the films we’ve seen so many times we can recite every line. This suggests that when we grieve for the dead artist, we are also mourning the piece of our identity we found within their art.
From Melissa’s DIY-resurrection ritual, to a dead celebrity prom and karaoke in hell, Lozada-Oliva has created a feminist, post-modern, pop cultural Divine Comedy. Dreaming Of You dramatizes the ways identity is often influenced by imitation and a longing to be something more than yourself. This fever dream fiction is engaging and refreshing as it masterfully draws on and plays with genre and cultural tropes to encapsulate the idiosyncrasies of our relationship with celebrity, culture, and ourselves.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Monstrous Reflections: Exploration of Celebrity and Identity in Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s Dreaming of You
FICTION REVIEW
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