Melissa Mogollon’s Debut Novel ‘Oye’ Explores Self-Care & Self-Sacrifice

Melissa Mogollon is a Colombian American writer and educator who uses her work to shine a light on women’s relationships with each other, their family, and their community. In May she released her debut novel Oye, which follows 18-year-old high school senior, Luciana, who is used to being the baby of her Colombian American family and shuttled to the sidelines. But when their South Florida town is hit by a hurricane warning and her grandmother is given a troubling medical diagnosis, she finds herself becoming the caretaker, translator, secret keeper, and leader of the pack carrying all the responsibility while her older sister Mari is away at college. Luciana begins to narrate her frustrating, complicated life, from when Abue moves into her bedroom and starts throwing out unreasonable demands, to when all of her attempts to sneak out and meet girls are shut down. Structured as a series of one-sided phone calls to Mari, this is a must-read book about matriarchy, complicated family dynamics, and what we owe each other. The story was born out of Mogollon’s own life and inspired by her own abuela who helped breathe life into the book.

“The book was Inspired by my real life grandmother who I had just finished taking care of for a few months while I was in grad school,” Mogollon tells HipLatina. “I just wanted my classmates to fall in love with her and I wanted them to laugh, so I wrote this caricature of her. I loved her as a character and I thought she was so funny, that she had so much life in her and jumped off the page for me. The story spilled out of me.”

But before Mogollon was a writer, she was – and still is – a teacher. As a teenager, she took time out of her day to tutor middle-grade students after school, which sparked her love for teaching and empowering young people through education. In college and grad school too, she again pursued her passion as an educator by teaching undergrad students as part of her program. After graduation, she took a two-year break from teaching, only to realize that she missed it too much to ever give it up completely and that it was a great way to work until she could make a sustainable living from writing. Today, she works at a boarding school for high schoolers where she teaches English literature, lives on campus, and assists students living in the dorms.

At the same time, she’s been a prolific writer. She first started out writing short stories, which she was introduced to in college. Because of the nature of short stories, which manage to tell an entire story from beginning to end in under 7,500 words, it was a great introduction into the world of writing and an approachable way to ease yourself into the craft of telling a story. But for her, it was also practical because she couldn’t yet see herself writing anything longer.

“The format of a novel was always overwhelming and I was also really young,” she says. “I was in grad school at 22 years old. So I did not really feel like I had anything important to say for a novel.”

Instead, she wrote humorous stories about Latina families and was especially interested in sibling dynamics and how the order siblings are born in can impact their personalities. Other times, it was surrealist stories, like one where a girl works at a bookstore and falls in love with a bookshelf to showcase the true depth of human loneliness.

But when it came to the writing process for Oye, Mogollon was experiencing and writing in ways that she’d never felt or tried before. As opposed to writing a self-contained short story, she wanted to place her characters into different situations. She saw many scenes play out so specifically and how each person would react and what they would say. She heard their voices so clearly and wrote without wanting to stop, knowing that what she was building was a novel.

The story unfolds and is structured into voicemails that Luciana leaves for her older sister Mari, who’s away at college, to complain about life at home and the chaos of their family consisting of her abuela, her mom, and Luciana herself. However, at the narrative center is Luciana and Abue’s relationship, where Luciana is struggling to put herself second and take care of a grandmother who is so independent that she refuses help, even when she needs it. Over the course of the novel, Abue opens up about decades-old family secrets and develops beyond a spunky and spirited grandmother, just as Luciana learns to accept responsibility for her life and ease into adulthood. Along with Luciana’s sporadically appearing mother, they create a matriarchal home world where women make the rules and hurt each other while also bring each other joy in equal measure.

Along the way, it was intentional for Moggolon that Mari never actually says anything in response to Luciana in order to reflect her own preferences and upbringing.

“In grad school, I was really drawn to this one-sided form of communication,” she explains. “I was writing short stories as voicemail transcripts, monologues, and letters. I was trying all these different ways of having one person speaking. And being from Miami, I know that sometimes we don’t really have conversations because we’re just trying to get our point across. So it felt funny and authentic to people I have grown up around.”

In that way, it was also an homage to the communication – or miscommunication – culture that exists within Latinx communities, such as leaving voice notes for family members through WhatsApp, sending inappropriate GIFs and memes, or starting arguments in the family group chat about old stories and memories. Along with blending languages like Spanish and English together, this oral history element was also important for her to include throughout the story, not only to differentiate it from traditional novel structures but also to pay homage to how we have been taught to communicate with one another post-colonization, which saw the erasure of our written and drawn texts.

For a while, Mogollon did try structuring it as a traditional novel with with dialogue or a third person where we see her point of view from an outside narrator. She even tried a version of the novel where Mari was talking back. But for her, nothing felt as right as centering Luciana’s voice through a phone call, where she said things that perhaps she wouldn’t say in her head and vice versa.

At the same time, Mogollon did face the challenge for a while of trying to figure out how to share information to the reader that she wants them to know but that Luciana might not share to her sister over the phone or even at all. For her, it was also important for the reader to see that Luciana was starting to hold things back from Mari and need her less in order to demonstrate her personal growth over the course of the story but that would only become clear if she somehow provided extra information and context. In the end, she decided to include sections that were in italics as a way to show the reader recollections and memories that Luciana wouldn’t say in the phone call in the same way, along with descriptions of the settings and specific dialogue.

Even as the story was coming together and Luciana’s voice flowed naturally, Mogollon struggled with finishing the novel. While the creation process was fun, writing a novel, especially in the revision process, is hard work between other responsibilities. Especially with her day job as a teacher and her Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), she had to structure time in between school breaks and vacation times to write.

Through the hardship, she considered completely giving up, even at one point crying in the shower. But in the end, it was Luciana’s character that propelled her to the finish line, writing for long days from 10 in the morning until almost midnight.

“I would picture Luciana yelling at me being like, ‘You got this, you need to finish, you’ve taken me this far, you need to finish,'” she says. “And I would look at her and think, ‘I love her. I have to do this for her.’ I also got into weightlifting and feeling strong in my body, which was helpful because writing a novel was going to require endurance. I also told myself that I would never write a book again because of how painful it was. It allowed me to enjoy it because I believe that it would be the last time I would do it. That helped a lot.”

If nothing else, Mogollon’s triumph was shared amongst her female characters as well, whose story needed to be told in order to, for once, center the inner and outer lives of Latina women. For years, Latinx literature has been dominated by male voices that have frequently underserved women or left them out entirely. It’s books like Mogollon’s that reshape that narrative and center a family of women who are deeply flawed but also alive with humor, wisdom, chisme, and love.

Looking ahead, Mogollon is planning to embark on her book tour this summer, with readings scheduled at bookstores around the east coast. She’s also currently working on a boarding school mystery novel about an English teacher who goes missing and the students who try to find them, which was inspired by a prompt she often gives to her students where they imagine what would happen if she went missing. She’s also excited to return to her creative roots through the short story form sometime in the near future. But ultimately, no matter what genre she writes, she always hopes to capture the beauty of relationships between people, the humor of a family, especially living under the same roof, and what happens when we actually speak to one another. She notes:

“I love analyzing and observing people, and then creating caricatures of certain elements of people or taking one part of a person’s personality and making it the entire character. People are so weird and funny because they embody so many different lives. And the more that I live in the different states I live in and the more that I meet different people, my mind is blown every day because you can really do life in so many different ways. There are so many different elements not in your control, but some are. I’m truly an addict to humans. Besides being fun, that’s what I love about storytelling.”