'Candelaria': Melissa Lozada-Oliva tackles cannibalism and yoga wellness cults in new novel

After you're done reading about cults, cannibalism and flesh-eating zombies, author and National Poetry Slam Champion Melissa Lozada-Oliva wants readers to "call their grandmothers."

"Candelaria" (Astra House, 320 pp., out now) is a novel following three generations of unruly and strong women: Candelaria, the matriarch; Lucia, her daughter; and granddaughters Bianca, an archaeologist, Candy, a recovering addict, and Paola, a brainwashed wellness cultist.

The sisters, estranged from one another over grief and family secrets, grapple with their diasporic identity, womanhood and vices all on their own. "They're all leading their own lives but they all circle back to each other," Lozada-Oliva says. "I wanted to show that in the cover (illustrated by London-based artist Polly Nor), they're in this battle, a dance and also a shared meal."

Lozada-Oliva's apocalyptic debut novel in prose is an ode to complicated family dynamics, the overwhelming ways love can consume and eat us alive. "I want readers to come away thinking about how fear and love are the same thing," she says.

A 'three-dimensional' portrayal of 'complicated but also loveable' women 

Lozada-Oliva wrote the women in "Candelaria" as "complicated and loveable" to "show that you can really mess up and still be someone who's deserving of love."

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In order to do that, she says, "You have to make everyone three-dimensional including the grandmother who is this sweet old lady, and a lot of her parts are really funny, but she's done some really messed up things in her lifetime. How does that pass on to the next generation and the next?"

All five women are viscerally feeling the effects of intergenerational trauma as they navigate what could possibly be the end of times. Their familial ties are a convoluted web of secrets, pent-up emotions and an all-consuming love for each other they can't express.

"I was just really fascinated by things we keep putting inside of us, and how you can be consumed by love," Lozada-Oliva says. "All of the characters are trying to grapple with the things they're consuming, whether it's Zoe and the wellness cult she's in; Bianca and her ideas about identity and archaeology; and Candy, which is literal, she's consuming literal bodies."

Each daughter is also dealing with their "Latinx identity in a different way, in a way that's super generational because they're enough ages apart."

Paola, the oldest, is closer to Gen X and "she's really ashamed of her Latinx identity, she really wants to be as white presenting as possible," she even changes her name to Zoe. The middle sister, Bianca, is more of a Millennial: "She's like, 'Who am I? What am I?" And Candy, the youngest, "has so much more to deal with than her identity that she kind of barely thinks about it."

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How the idea for 'Candelaria' sparked from a 2015 poem 

In her follow-up to 2021's "Dreaming Of You," a novel in verse, Lozada-Oliva dips her toes into prose with "Candelaria."

"I always wanted to … I wouldn't say transition to prose because I still write poetry and it's still very much a part of the way that I write but I think I was always drifting towards stories," she says.

It was a 2015 poem after all, titled "How To Survive The Zombie Apocolypse As An 82-Year-Old Guatemalan Grandmother," that helped set the foundation for her first novel.

Her agent, she says, encouraged her to "really do something with this," so she began thinking about how to transform the poem into a fully fleshed story.

"I always came back to this concept because it was so much fun for me to write and it was so fun to think of an elderly Guatemalan woman surviving the apocalypse, looking at a zombie and being like, 'OK big deal, I've been through so much worse,'" she says.

Honoring the role our elders serve as oral historians of sorts was also the plan.

"A lot of the stories our elders tell us seem insane and they seem like they're made up and sometimes you realize they were embellished a little bit, but oftentimes, they've simply just been through so much more than I've been through at least. I wanted to honor that in a really fantastical way," Lozada-Oliva adds. "And from there, I fleshed out this crazy story."

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Writing 'Candelaria' as an act of preservation 

In "Candelaria," Lozada-Oliva writes, "Actually, when Bianca thought about it, what she really cared about was preservation. Archiving, not archaeology … She realized something that felt equally important and stupid; you need other people to help you figure out who you are."

"Some of my friends can trace back their ancestry so far and I can really only go back two generations," Lozada-Oliva says. "There's so much that has been erased from us in the Latin diaspora, on purpose. It's really important for me to preserve what I can."

As children of immigrants, and those belonging to the Latin American diaspora, trying to piece together our roots and our family's past feels like a neverending jigsaw puzzle. For this novel, zombies and cannibalism aside, Lozada-Oliva highlighted the 1976 7.5 magnitude earthquake in Guatemala that killed 23,000 people and displaced thousands of others. Her mother, who is Guatemalan, and more family members, experienced this natural disaster before moving to the states in the '80s.

"It's such a recent past but we're still so different (from our parents)," she says. "Maybe we're at this point in our lives where we look like our parents when they came here and we're thinking about getting older and what the world will look like … we're at this age where we can look back enough and we want to honor our past."

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