Molly Olguín is a writer and educator based in Seattle, and her debut collection The Sea Gives Up The Dead is one of the most unforgettable books of the year. In it, a lovesick nanny slays a dragon, the devil tries to save her mother, and a girl drowns and becomes a saint. Blending historical fiction, horror, and fantasy, these stories explore grief, queerness, and love with striking imagination and heart.
We asked Olguín to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know her and the books that shaped her life.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
The Chronicles of Narnia, for sure. I had a lot of childhood book loves—Tolkien! Animorphs! A Wrinkle in Time!—but I’ll go with Narnia because the word obsession really fits the bill. I had this little notebook where I drew all the characters—like, every single character from every Narnia book, on a different sheet of paper. And then on the Aslan page, there’s a weird brown smear, and that’s because I picked a scab on my knee and pressed the blood to the drawing. I have no real idea why I did this, except that I loved Aslan so much I wanted to love him in blood. If that sounds cultish and fevered, I think it’s because being cultish and fevered is genuinely one of the great joys of childhood. You’re falling in love with other peoples’ worlds and characters and ideas for the first time! You’re very small! There’s not enough room in your body for all that brand new excitement and insight and love! So maybe you bleed onto a notebook about it.
What book helped you through puberty?
A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L’Engle, which I carried around with me like a talisman from age twelve to about age fourteen, just a permanent addition at the bottom of my backpack. It’s about this teenage girl who’s spending the summer on an island with her dying grandfather, and while she copes with his death, she’s also caught between a wealthy bad boy and a young marine biologist who takes her to swim with dolphins. It’s the perfect storm of change, which is central to puberty, right? Grief changes you, love changes you, lust changes you. Plus, dolphins, which are sort of the perfect symbol of girlhood—there are just as many dolphin girls as horse girls and wolf girls—while also being genuinely cool at any age. Have you seen a dolphin lately? Dolphins are amazing. I could look at dolphins all day. So there’s something about resisting change, too—everything around you and inside of you might change, but you can always find beauty and love and connection in the natural world.
What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?
I’m a high school English teacher, so this is a question I’ve given some thought to! The boring real answer is that I don’t think there is one book all teens should be assigned in school, because the needs of the specific kids are going to change from population to population and year to year—and also because I think the teacher has to love the book in order to do a good job teaching it. It doesn’t matter how great the book is—if the teacher doesn’t love it and respect it, the material won’t work. So the real answer is, whatever book you most love that most speaks to the needs of your students.
But that’s boring! So my second answer is my favorite book pairing to teach: The Great Gatsby and Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, which is an adaptation of Gatsby that reimagines Jordan Baker as a queer Vietnamese woman interacting with literal magic. The Great Gatsby gets kind of a bad rap in high school classrooms, fraught as it is with a hundred years of obligation and expectation, but I find it a genuine joy to teach—and then you put it next to The Chosen and the Beautiful, and that book both tells a beautiful story of its own and shines a light into The Great Gatsby and illuminates all the dark corners. This pairing is a joy for me and my students every single year, and the rewards it gives us are things I think every teenager should find in school: beauty in classic literature, deserved critique of the canon, a compelling understanding of how history shapes books and how historical fiction can speak to the present moment, queer-coding and racial passing where you least expect it, queer characters of color whose experiences are centered and unmistakable. Truly a feast for teachers and teenagers alike!
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I literally made a list of twenty titles before realizing that would be a terrible answer to your question, so instead I’m going to force myself to just pick one example for each genre that I love. But I need you to know that the list I could make is really long!
Novels: I’m gonna go with Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. It’s gorgeous prose, it’s a heartbreaking story that cuts its narrator and its audience in about twenty different ways, the narrative unspools in this inevitable but no less harrowing slow reveal. I love this book.
Short Stories: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima made me stand up and, like, take a lap partway through reading it. It’s just so good.
Plays: First off I just have to say that plays are such a huge source of inspiration and pleasure to me as both a teacher and a prose writer. More than almost any other genre I feel instructed by plays—they cut to the heart of dialogue, of rhythm, and of narrative. I wish more people read plays for fun! I absolutely have to go with Indecent by Paula Vogel, which is this beautiful play about queer censorship and antisemitism and the power of art. Opera fans talk about this thing called the frisson, which is when the singer hits this note that makes the hair on your arms stand up and chills go through you in this fevered ache of sympathetic response. I get the frisson from most of the books on this list, but I’ve never read Indecent and not gotten the frisson.
Poetry: Bluff by Danez Smith. Like, are you kidding me? On the level of craft, on the level of urgency, heartbreak, challenge, experiment, beauty—this book is everything.
Nonfiction: There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib—I’ve been a huge fan of Abdurraqib’s writing for years, and his most recent book of essays (about basketball! I don’t even like basketball!) is exactly what I return to his work for: deeply beautiful prose, incredibly clear insight, and just some of the most searing and honest writing about love of all kinds that I’ve ever read.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell and Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado were both huge sources of inspiration for me, for the permission
both of those books gave me to get weird as well as because they’re intensely beautiful and moving. Both of those books gave me the same feeling, at different points of my life—St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves when I was in undergrad, and Her Body and Other Parties when I was in grad school—that this was what I wanted to do, this is who I wanted to be when I grew up. That’s a guiding post if anything is.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’m halfway through Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, which is audacious and hilarious and painful, and I just picked up Don’t Sleep With the Dead, Nghi Vo’s followup to The Chosen and the Beautiful (it’s a sequel to Gatsby this time, not an adaptation!), which I’m really excited about. Other books in the stack are The Rib Joint by Julia Koets, Guatemalan Rhapsody by Jared Lemus, and Buried Deep by Naomi Novik.