The Unraveling of Ou with Hollay Ghadery

Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Since then, she’s produced a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, a short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, and a poetry chapbook, the leaves of grass are dreaming. Her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, is being published this month by Windsor’s Palimpsest Press.
Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives. She’s also a host on The New Books Network. and a host of HOWL—the literary arts show—on 89.5 CIUT FM.

https://www.hollayghadery.ca/

https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/the-unravelling-of-ou-hollay-ghadery/

Transcript

Welcome to All Write in Sin City, a podcast about writers and writing in the Windsor,
Detroit region. Your podcasters today are Irene Moore Davis, author, educator, and local historian.
Kim Conklin, Windsor-based writer and filmmaker. And me, Sarah Jarvis, former bookseller,
publishing rep, and literary festival chair.
Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on
Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness,
was published by Guernica Editions Miroland imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Book Club Award for
non-fiction memoir. Since then, she's produced a collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, a short fiction
collection, widow fantasies, and a poetry chapbook, The Leaves of Grass Are Dreaming. Her debut novel,
The Unraveling of OO, is being published this month by Windsor's Palimpsest Press. Halei is a board
member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the poet
laureate of the region in which she lives. She's also a host on the New Books Network and a host of
Howl, the literary arts show, on 89.5 CIUT-FM. Welcome, Halei.
Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure to talk with you all.
So, the main character of this novel is an Iranian-born woman named Minoo. When we meet her,
she's visiting the maternity ward to meet her new granddaughter. She brings along her imaginary
friend and closest confidant, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, and it's Ecology Paul who narrates the
entire novel. What inspired you to work with this highly original point of view?
I suppose I didn't really think about it as particularly original or anything, but I guess
it was a confluence of just what was happening at that time in my life. So, I was reading Adele
Wiseman's Old Woman at Play, which is a really wonderful book on creativity and mothers and daughters and
artistic practice. And it centers largely around her mother making these dolls out of things she finds
around the house, like the onion netting bags and like fish bones and really interesting and original
things. But with her mom's case, it was a trauma response to living through the Second World War.
And so, I was reading this book about creativity and dolls and the dolls were a little bit unsettling
to look at, but I mean, they were made not to be unsettling. Like, she'd give them to kids in
hospitals and stuff, but I was looking at them going, these are a little bit strange. But then I started
to think about the actual act of using these dolls. And also, at the same time, I had very young
children and we were making a lot of sock puppets, which are an easy thing to make. And because I can
never seem to match socks, I always had like lone socks that I could use for such things. So there
was that. I was thinking very deeply on how women uphold the patriarchy. And I was checking myself on
some responses I was having to my eldest daughter, who was growing up and things that I wanted to say
in reaction to her sometimes. I had to stop myself from saying. But I wanted to say them or make
comments on the way she was dressed or something because they were comments that had been made to me
throughout my life. And, you know, not I didn't say them, but I had to interrogate myself a little bit.
And then I was also just thinking about absurdity and how absurdity is such a clarifying agent and how
I can be accused sometimes of not taking very much seriously. But the truth is, I use absurdity because
I take everything seriously. And absurdity helps me reframe the world and focus on what really is
important by kind of letting what isn't important flake away. So I was thinking a lot about that. And is it
really that I'm not a serious person? And I shouldn't be taken seriously? Or is there a reason that I'm really
drawn to absurdity? So there was that. And then I just started writing this book. And eventually,
the dominant voice in my notebooks, the sock just kind of took over. There were supposed to be other
voices. But the sock was the only voice I was interested in. And it was the most authentic voice.
And it was the only one I wanted to pay attention to. So I just, it kind of just evolved over time into
just the sock talking. I love the idea of a sock as the most authentic voice. I mean, how wonderful.
One of the most powerful characters in the book is Minoo's mother, a conservative Iranian woman who seems
to hate her daughter, perhaps for being female. What causes her to be so cold to her daughter? And was
it challenging to write that kind of character while making her fully rounded?
I really like Minoo's mom as a character to write. Like, I wouldn't want to live with somebody like
that. I am very privileged that I never had to live with anybody like that. But I, what I loved about
Minoo's mom about writing her is that it gave me an opportunity to try to show how people become the
way they are, or one possible way that this person became the way that she was is that it's not like
she actually hates her daughter, although it absolutely seems that way. Um, it's not that it's that she's
terrified. And she doesn't know what to do with all these immense emotions that she is feeling and never
figured out how to express and never figured out how to manage. And she is a product of the way she was
raised as well. And she is a product of her fear. And she is a product of her loneliness and sadness and
repression. And, you know, some of us take all that and push against it. And some of us don't. Right. And
she she didn't, she became it. Uh, but that's a slow reveal. As the book goes on, it's nothing you
really know at the beginning, you're just like, wow, why does this woman even have a child? Because
she's terrible to her and Minoo loves her so much. So it was more of an observation of other women I had
seen other experiences that I had seen with mothers being truly horrible to their daughters,
and being so hard on their daughters. And I was interested in exploring and thinking, well,
why? Why would somebody be that way? Yeah, I think I might just want to write them off as a terrible
person. But and that's certainly the easiest thing to do. But if I try to give this person grace,
and I try to give this person empathy, maybe what would make them the way they are. So that's where
Minoo's mom came from. Like I said, not somebody I'd actually want to know in my everyday life, but was
intensely fulfilling to write.
Can we expand on that idea of what Minoo's mother went through? Because her daughter Roya is not a fan of Ecology Paul. And then there's that emotional rift between mothers and daughters. And so another theme that you bring out is society's repression of women. Are these things connected? And how do you feel that you balance them within writing?
Sure, I balance them at all. I mean, if I did, great. I'm very, very happy. But with the balancing or with the creation of, you know, these women oppressing women, it wasn't until I'm going to be really honest, it wasn't until I got an advanced review by Rebecca, who does Canada Reads American Style podcast. It's a very cool podcast. She did like a little preview on her social media saying that Minoo is,
not a good mother. And I'm like, really? I never thought of Minoo was not a good mother, but she's absolutely correct. Like she's, she's a different kind of not good mother. So she's not as hard and edgy as her own mother was, but she's, she hurts her daughter in a completely different way.
Um, which I wasn't really, I mean, it's complete, it's right, but it wasn't something I was intentionally doing because writing this book.
I mean, the, none of these characters are me, but if I had to pick one that was the closest to me, it would be Ecology Paul, it'd be the puppet. Um, because none of these women, I don't have a, they don't reflect my life experience really. I mean, I was never pregnant when I was 14. Um, I've never yelled at my daughters about where they put sanitary napkins. Like I've, none of this has ever happened. So with this, because everything is through the perspective of this puppet.
I wasn't really, then the puppet adores Minoo. Um, and the puppets also kind of hard on Minoo and the puppet is Minoo. Um, I, I was so intensely immersed in Ecology Paul's brain that I, I really didn't, I was blind to the fact that Minoo was being a terrible person, even though I was writing Minoo, um, which makes no sense whatsoever. I get it. And then it wasn't until someone was like, she's not a good mother. I was like, no, you're right. She wasn't a good mother.
Um, which is fine. It was a revelation to me too. But with these, I think a sock puppet is the perfect way to examine the really tough things like the oppression of women from within, um, from within the confines of women, from within the brains of women.
Because, you know, women can sit here and say, smash the patriarchy, but imagine how much easier it would be to smash the patriarchy if women just supported each other. If women didn't always shove each other down. If women didn't call each other names, women didn't slut shame other women.
I mean, it would be so much easier to dismantle this incredibly damaging system. If every single woman was just like, you know what, we are not going to be catty, critical or competitive with an other woman ever again. And, and stop playing into it. So that's what I was really consciously interested in, like exploring.
Was that and puppets historically, if we think about the Victorian era, where you couldn't even have the leg of a table showing, but they would still have puppet shows that talked about the really difficult things that people were not allowed to talk about.
And how puppets have been used throughout history to talk about difficult things. So to me, like the puppet, like, I appreciate that it seems original, but to me, it seemed like the most obvious thing to talk about these issues, this most obvious medium to talk about these issues.
And to me, Ecology Paul is very much their own character. Like, so it's interesting how some writers or some readers are telling me, oh, it's Minoo. And other writers are saying, oh, it's, ooh, like it's the combination of both Minoo and the puppet. And then for me, I always just see Ecology Paul as a completely separate entity that's examining these systems of oppression from very much within the systems.
Well, for the record, I'm not sure Minoo is a terrible mother. She may be an unprepared mother. Yeah. So I don't mean to take issue with anybody, but yeah, she was a little unprepared, I think.
Yeah, I don't think Rebecca actually said she was terrible, just that cycles were repeating themselves in different ways.
That may be true. Yeah. But I think that is part of the point of the book, perhaps. Yeah. So one of the things that you talk about is the ou of the title is a word in Farsi.
And that it's a non-gendered pronoun. And in this very old language, there is no distinction between male and female. So why was that a key point for you to make in this book?
And in your view, how much power does language have to shape or reshape attitude toward gender?
Yeah, I mean, so in Farsi, ou is the generalist pronoun for he or she. There is very much a distinction, obviously, between men and women in the culture. But they don't have a separate pronoun for these things. Now, there is a separate pronoun for they. So, you know, there is that.
But he and she are just the same. Ou. And I remember the first time I really realized that because I didn't grow up speaking Farsi, it's something that I've come to later in life.
My father didn't see any value in teaching a child or any of his children to learn Farsi, which he considered a useless language in Canada, like for us to learn.
And it wasn't until later when I started learning myself that I even realized I was just delighted by it. Like I find myself delighted with a lot of language, but I was just delighted by the fact that this this culture that people arguably wrongly think of is so.
You think of Iranian culture and you think of people, women being oppressed and you think about, you know, all these really terrible, terrible, terrible things.
I mean, actually, like the government is its own issue, but the people are completely not the government and how this language is actually really revolutionary in so many ways.
And Farsi is just this beautiful language. Anyways, it's very dramatic, very, very beautiful, poetic language without even trying.
You know, like in Farsi, if you want to say that you, you know, love someone, you might say, which means I'll eat your liver.
Like that's a pretty dramatic thing to say to someone. Or if you just, you know, you say to someone, which is like, I'll sacrifice myself for you.
But it's like somebody opens the door for you or, you know, you open the door for someone and they're like, and it's just like you don't need to sacrifice yourself.
I just open the door, but it's a very dramatic language. And I think that it was really fun for me to insert little bits of Farsi into the text to give a flavor for it.
And I didn't really explain it. But within the context of sentences, I think people can figure it out.
And I didn't feel the need to translate for people. I didn't think it was, you know, that obscure or obfuscating, I should say.
So, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, I'm a poet. I think language is so much fun.
I think language is like, especially when you distill language, especially when you play with language, especially when you subvert language and you take a sentence that, you know, is usually read one way and just flip some words so it's read another.
I mean, I think it's incredibly powerful to disrupt expectations and disrupt standards and use language to just be a bit of a shit disturber.
And like, I mean, shit disturber in the best possible way. Like I think about how sometimes like kids can be shit disturbers by saying something they're not supposed to say, like saying the quiet part loud.
And that's essentially what this book is trying to do. Not even trying to do. It's just what I do naturally.
It's like, I'll try to say the quiet part loud. I try to be playful. I try to be like charmingly disruptive.
I never want anyone to be hurt, but I do want to shake people out of our collective apathy.
And I think, of course, language and especially poetry, and I'm a poet first, is the best way to do this.
And I very much went into this book thinking of it like a very big poem, but a poem that I was forced to like put within certain narrative conventions, which was new for me.
But I managed to do it. I mean, it did take me being like, OK, you need to explain this a little bit more to the reader.
One of my favorite bits of feedback was from the wonderful editor, Margot LaPierre, who is also a beautiful poet and writer.
And I can remember her commenting on a section and saying that I needed to show less and just tell more.
And I was like, how many? Usually it's the other way around. People are told to show, not tell.
But I was like, you know, it's OK just to say someone walked across the room.
You can just like tell the reader what's happening. But I felt like, no, I have to show everything.
Everything has to be inferred and implied. And it was definitely language wise a challenge for me to like break out of that and just like explain that something is happening just by saying it's happening.
Like that doesn't sound as cool, though. But it was a learning experience.
We learned that Minoo was sent to Canada to live with a cousin after having a son while still quite young.
Her cousin Kala tries to help Minoo live more freely and she does for a time.
Eventually, she falls into the same traditional home life as her mother lived.
Why did it feel right for this character to repeat the traditional pattern rather than choose a more independent identity?
Yeah, I mean, I suppose it is a bit of a traditional pattern.
In this case, it was simply because I wanted to show that like maybe her mother, Minu didn't have enough of a sense of herself to really be anything.
Now, being a stay at home mom is absolutely a wonderful identity working in the home.
I mean, I would do it in a second if we if I could.
I would gladly just, you know, stay at home, take care of my children, like wash the outside windows, which so needs to be done.
And I never seem to have time to do.
But with Minoo, it's kind of like this decision that just is like, OK, I guess this is what I'm doing now.
And she doesn't really think about it.
It's just that she's in a financial position where they can do it.
And she does it.
She's doing it for different reasons than her mother did.
But, you know, she has this passion for drama and theater and she studies it, but she really doesn't do anything with it.
Like she she taps out of that saying, oh, I'll just I'll just be at home, which is, again, fine if it's something that she truly felt passionate about.
But I wanted to make clear that that's not it.
It's just that she doesn't really believe in herself enough to commit or to be passionate about anything because she is so lost.
So she does fall into the same pattern as her mom, but not necessarily for the same reasons as her mom did.
As she takes on that role of motherhood, you talk about it being motherhood being a burden.
In one passage, ecology, Paul, for example, notes that Minoo becomes more dependent on him and then she loses herself as she's a full time mother.
Is it inevitable that mothers lose their individuality?
So is it possible to maintain a sense of personhood and still parent?
I mean, I have four kids and I think I'm very much still a person.
I absolutely think so.
With Minoo, a lot of her inability to interact with her daughter is not because she actually is a horrible mother.
It's because of the trauma of having to leave her firstborn.
So it's one of those things like it's like not being able to look at Roya without seeing Davud, without feeling her failure there.
So like her distance from her daughter is not that she's that her daughter is actually any kind of burden is that Minoo's own past is a burden.
Minoo's own experiences are a burden that has nothing to do with her daughter and everything to do with her being unable to process what happened and being unable to see how little of what happened was actually her fault.
She was a child.
She has been made to feel ashamed and guilty of herself her whole life.
So it's not at all that motherhood is a burden.
It's that shame is a burden.
And that is something that she cannot escape from.
And because she cannot escape from it, she cannot look at her daughter without feeling everything that she feels ashamed of from her past.
The fact that she got pregnant when she was 14.
The fact that she left her son behind, who she loved very much.
The fact that she needed her mom and her mother was never there and she was never good enough for her mom.
The fact that her father never stood up for her, really, and that she feels unworthy of everything.
The fact that she has been repressing her queer identity and the fact that she is not straight and that she has never really learned to love her body or herself.
And she's just completely detached from everything.
So, no, I don't think motherhood is a burden at all.
I think that it is completely.
I mean, I think I'm more myself since I became a mother because I felt forced.
Like, personally, I feel like I was forced into it because I suddenly had to be like, wow, I have to, you know, I have all these people who are only ever going to see me as kind of one thing.
And I don't want that for them.
I want them to see me as this multifaceted individual who has a life outside of them.
I want them as they if they become parents to realize that, you know, you don't have to sacrifice yourself and you can be more than one thing at once and you can be good at more than one thing at once.
This is also a book about culture and fitting in.
We've talked about gender roles already.
So in what other ways did you find that Minoo's Iranian roots impacted the story and her character?
I wanted to be very careful with that because I've never lived in Iran.
I am a dual citizen, but I've never lived there.
I grew up very much in a cultural Iranian household, a culturally Iranian household.
I grew up within an Islamic framework.
But I didn't want to make it that religion had anything necessarily to do with what was going on with her mom.
I wanted to make it like a combination of a cultural understanding.
Also pointing out that there are so many people who are Iranian in Manu's life who do not, who are not like her mother.
Her mother is not representative of Iranian women.
Her mom is a representative of a certain type of person that you could find in any country, in any culture.
So there is absolutely that.
And of course, there is a degree of the government imposed restrictions after the revolution that do influence things.
But I'm really careful not to paint Iran with this myopic brush.
Because, I mean, when my amis, my aunts on my dad's side came to visit, my family's still there.
People I talked to, I mean, Amat is obviously the government is just a mess and terrible.
But the people living there don't fit this stereotype that a lot of Western media and a lot of Western people, Western understandings have of them.
So I was super conscious of not playing into that and not playing into any kind of restrictive cultural motif that would be there.
Like that might make people think that I was having this damning, this damning indictment of Iranian culture or people.
So I didn't want that.
But there's definitely Minoo being influenced by a certain culture, certain expectations of girls, certain expectations of what you should do when you're married and who you should marry and why you should marry and all of that.
So that's definitely there.
But I really didn't want to make it overarching or anything that would play into any...
Because there's so many books that play up certain stereotypes of Middle Eastern people.
And that's not been my experience.
And I wanted to break free of that while still very much showing the culture and showing the really good things about the culture.
Like Kala is this person who reminds me so much of my Ames, very fiery, believes what she believes in, isn't afraid to tell anybody off for hurting someone they love.
And I wanted that to be clear too.
And that Minu's mother is an incredibly oppressive force, but she is not representative of every woman in Iran, growing up in Iran.
You've had a book published every year since 2023.
What's the secret to your success?
Oh, gosh, there is none.
It's actually just weird timing with publications, right?
Like, so, you know, I'm 44.
I had my first book accepted for publication just before I was 40.
I'd been writing the whole time before that.
But I was still very much battling with eating disorders and addiction.
And, you know, as much as people think, oh, taking drugs makes me so creative, at least in my experience, it did not.
It made me, made everything slow down.
It made it hard to follow through on things.
So I had a lot of kind of half-baked ideas laying around from, you know, my 20s and 30s where I wasn't as committed to writing and I couldn't follow through.
And then basically about eight years ago, I got sober.
And then is when I started pulling things together and finishing things.
And I guess it was like this frenetic energy where I felt like I had to make up for lost time.
And I had this backlog of ideas that were like pushing at the back of my eyeballs trying to get out.
So I felt this urgency and not an urgency that was coming from outside, like you have to produce to be relevant.
Not that, but like an urgency coming from like a soul level that I need to get this stuff out.
Like it's been sitting here and I'm going to like vomit if I don't do it.
So I just wrote very quickly.
I wrote at night.
I wrote when like on my phone or in a notebook when my kids were in swimming lessons.
Like I completely deromanticized the inspiration writing process and was like, no, this is just going to happen when it happens, even if it's only five minutes a day.
So there wasn't really a secret as much as I had like a backlog, I guess.
And I know I'm saying this, that, you know, I'm not actually that productive and I don't feel like I am that productive or prolific.
But I mean, I do have two books coming out in 2027, too.
So I'm not really helping myself with this argument.
But it's really just that I there was a backlog.
And after 2027, I'm very much looking forward to not stopping, but just like going back to poetry and taking a deep break and enjoying enjoying that and being in the community, like supporting others, continuing with my my speaking roles, my mentorships and broadcasting that I do for the literary arts.
But not not like turning out so much because I don't I don't feel like that's who I am.
It's just the timing of when people pick up books for publication.
Like I have no control over when they slot things in and it just all kind of happened in this group.
Very cool. And I'm glad that that's happening for you.
That is amazing.
So we'd love to hear a little bit of from The Unraveling of Ou for our audience.
Would you care to read for us?
Yeah, sure. So I'm just going to read from the first chapter, the opening chapter.
And it's really I think all the chapters are fairly not when I say fairly short.
I mean, like we're not you're not going to be reading like more in peace here.
So I'm going to read that opening and it starts with the chapter heading.
It's not every day a soft puppet visits a maternity ward.
Minoo and I fly down the hall.
The anticipated squeak of hospital vinyl absent from under our feet.
We are weightless.
Shoes barely touching the ground.
A reflection of Minoo's form glides beneath us.
Wraith like we are darkly mirrored in the freshly waxed floor.
In Minoo, she stares ahead unseen.
Not seeing me, I mean.
As conspicuous as I am to everyone else, my existence is as natural to her as the weight of her tongue in her mouth or the air filling the lungs in her chest.
She doesn't see the nurse who jumps out of our way either, flattening her body to the wall, blue eyes large with shock.
I know Minoo would rather cut off her arm than look at me.
I can feel it.
Her hand, her hand with a soft palm and short nails is less of a hand now and more of a fist.
It's metacarpal tension, curls in my body.
Minoo.
I try to say her name, but she won't let me open my mouth.
Minoo, listen to me.
Ahead, the elevator doors slide open.
A boy emerges with a bouquet of balloons.
He looks at us as we pass, then turns to look again, a smile tickling the corner of his mouth.
The boy's cola-colored eyes sparkle, registering my absurdity.
My static gray skin and yellow pipe cleaner curls bursting wildly from the top of my head.
My lolling red felt tongue.
My eyes, one round, flat and green, placed half an inch lower than the left,
which is smaller and black and not flat but domed like half a gumdrop.
Me, a handmade toy perched dumbly on the hand of a frazzled and frizzy-haired middle-aged woman.
A woman who would look a lot more pulled together, even pretty, if she put a little lip gloss and massaged some serum into her hair like I suggested.
She had been going to meet her grandbaby for the first time, and while the baby wouldn't have cared how she'd look, her daughter did.
Mariah would have cared if she made the effort, and Mariah had cared.
A lot.
I see me as the boy must, a crudely made toy.
I admit my appearance is more primitive than Minu's later creations, but my simplicity has served me well.
Out of all of us, I'm the only one still here.
The boy stands under his rainbow balloon umbrella, smiling.
He's the last thing I see before the elevator doors close, and Minu slams me into the steel panel.
Slams me again and again until our bodies vibrate with the force of her pains.
Our sadness.
Because I may be the stuff of stuffing and nonsense, but I can feel as much as Minu.
And of course, I'm the reason Roya shouted at us to leave.
Leave.
Now.
And take that thing with you.
She called me a thing, but Roya knows my name.
She could recognize my face before she could recognize her own.
She's known it for almost as long as she's known Minu's, though I don't claim she studied mine with as much devotion.
Mothers are gods.
First true loves.
Minu falls forward, chest heating.
She rests her head beside mine on the panel.
The cool shock of steel is calming and her breathing slows.
My body relaxes.
She rolls her forehead so her eyes meet mine.
It's okay, Minu.
My voice, which has always been high, is tight now, too.
I clear my throat and try to relax my pitch.
It's okay.
Let's talk.
Hollay Ghadery, thank you very much for joining us.
Thank you.
The Unraveling of Ou is published by Palimpsest Press.
It's available in January of 2026.
Thanks for joining us.
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