A Sock Puppet Tackles Motherhood, Memory, and Identity: A Conversation with Hollay Ghadery
A Sock Puppet Tackles Motherhood, Memory, and Identity: A Conversation with Hollay Ghadery
The cheeky homemade sock puppet on the cover of Hollay Ghadery’s debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, looks cute and fun-loving, with its pouf of yellow yarn hair and green button eyes. But it belies the story inside. The Unravelling of Ou unfolds through the voice of Ecology Paul, a puppet narrator who acts as a defensive mask for Minoo, an Iranian-Canadian mother navigating displaced identity and profound maternal loss.
With psychological acuity, Ghadery explores the emotional world of Minoo, a woman who must decide if she is ready to cast aside her woollen defenses so that she can accept the reality of her own life.
Ghadery’s novel moves between flashbacks of the rigid societal expectations of 1990s Iran that Minoo experienced as a teenager to her present-day life in Ontario, Canada. It explores the burden of secrets and the unravelling necessary to cross a void filled with generational trauma, separation and longing, and maternal health.
Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Her other books are Fuse (Guernica Editions, 2021), an acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, which won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir, a debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023), her short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024), and a chapbook, the blades of grass are dreaming (Anstruther Press, 2025). The Unravelling of Ou is published by Palimpsest Press. Ghadery is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives, and a host on New Books Network.
Sheelagh Caygill spoke with Ghadery in a wide-ranging interview about how she approaches creativity with her children, the pressures of motherhood, and how it felt to write her debut fiction novel.
Sheelagh Caygill: The very thing that helps the character Minoo survive trauma is that which prevents her from fully living. Sock puppet Ecology Paul is Minoo’s buffer; she needs Ecology Paul so that she can move through a world too difficult to face. We all have behaviors that help us get through the day-to-day—they are just not as obvious as a sock puppet. How did you settle on a sock puppet as a buffer?
Hollay Ghadery: I don’t think I consciously settled on the sock puppet. Rather, the puppet settled on me. When I was writing this book, I was reading Adele Wiseman’s excellent memoir of creativity and motherhood, Old Woman At Play, which explores—among many other things—her mother’s prolific doll making. I was thinking about the interior lives of women and the way we cope with the difficulties and limitations that surround the experience of being born in our bodies. To survive, many of us use the tools at our disposal. Not everyone can get away from it all or has access to therapy. Sometimes we have to find our own way through with whatever we have in front of us.
As a mother of four children, I’ve made my fair share of sock puppets. They are easy to make, good fun, and I never seem to run out of single socks that have lost their partners. My mother was crafty and sewed a lot and that rubbed off on me. I keep things like spare buttons, ribbons, and baubles, and have a substantial craft supply. I also have a small collection of hand puppets—a narwhal, a lamb, a raven, a polar bear, and a few others. I am always surprised by how the moment I slip on a puppet a whole identity materializes, one that’s separate from my own. I am naturally inclined to whimsy, so early in the writing process, a sock puppet wandered into my imagination and didn’t leave. And it makes sense: puppets are often used to address issues and experiences that we feel are too difficult or too taboo to explore directly. In the end, the puppet feels like the most natural narrator of the story.
SC: Without giving too much away, can you tell us about Minoo and Ecology Paul’s relationship? Is he with her always? Does she carry him in her bag wherever she goes? Does she speak his voice or hear his thoughts?
HG: As readers will learn as they get further into the story, Ecology Paul is not always with Minoo—especially not in the beginning, when she is less dependent on her make-believe friend. Minoo does things without the puppet, but since the puppet and Minoo are connected, Ecology Paul does not have to be there in order to relate to every part of Minoo’s life. Readers learn of Ecology Paul’s perch at home, which is by the kitchen window, slipped over a glass soda bottle. The puppet often observes things from that vantage point, but again he does not need to be with Minoo to know what is happening in her life.
SC: The Unravelling of Ou is a beautifully written novel, and some sentences shine as poetry. They reminded me of prose by writers such as Paul Harding, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Sadiqa de Meijer. How does your work as a poet influence how you approached this novel? Did some paragraphs and sentences naturally evolve as poetic, or did you consciously decide to apply poetic techniques to certain parts of the book?
HG: Everything’s a poem to start. Each scene began with the kind of feeling that would inform a poem, but then I made sentences longer. I explained things I would never explain in a poem. I created a world and backstory and a plot map so I could focus on driving the action forward, though this book is still far more character-based than plot-based. My work as a poet influenced this novel because it aims to show more than tell; it attempts to articulate the unquantifiable nature of being without over-intellectualizing it—that moment you feel heartache. Or joy. Or fear. That moment before one puts those feelings into words. As much as possible, and when possible, I wanted to let the poetic impulse as I experience it to be a defining characteristic of the book.
SC: How did your experiences as a mother and a daughter influence and/or shape The Unravelling of Ou?
HG: The story is not based on my life, but of course, there are underlying themes to which I think a lot of women and mothers and daughters can relate. In the first pages, the puppet says something to the effect of mothers being gods. I feel so much is expected of mothers. We are expected to know everything and be perfect, which is impossible. It’s easy to see how someone would crumble under that weight. When I first became a mother, I felt that pressure. I don’t anymore. I hold myself to a standard of honesty with my children over perfection.
As a daughter, I was interested in the way we as mothers try to protect our daughters and end up hurting them by projecting our own insecurities and internalized misogyny onto them. It was important to me to hold multiple truths simultaneously while writing this book.
SC: The title references the Farsi pronoun ‘ou’ which is gender-neutral. Does this lack of linguistic gender distinction in your Iranian family influence your creation of a mother who feels untethered from traditional, gendered expectations of parenting?
HG: I wouldn’t say so. Not in my family, since I was raised in a traditional family unit. By Western standards, I would even say my upbringing was strict, in some respects. I did not grow up speaking Farsi fluently. I knew a handful of words and I could understand some of what was being said around me if others were speaking Farsi. My discovery of this genderless pronoun happened in my 30s as I began to try to learn Farsi for myself. Its discovery fit nicely into a worldview and way of being I was already developing. So while the unearthing of “ou” parallelled nicely into this book, I was not raised with knowledge of its existence. And it’s not like this genderless pronoun reflects a lack of gender stereotypes or conventions in Iranian culture. There are certainly gender distinctions that govern the lives and identities of many.
SC: Minoo’s mother was raised by a bitter widow who was often harsh with Minoo, to the point that Minoo rarely felt seen. In time, Minoo carries her own “stony weight” which formed following an event that, for most mothers, would cause unbearable pain. What was it like for you, as a mother, to write about that experience, along with Minoo’s journey at such a vulnerable age from Iran to Canada?
HG: I have a lot of experience feeling unheard and unsupported. There are many times in my past where I felt I had no control over my own life. I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong anywhere. I wanted to show the excruciating torment of Minoo’s impotence: she has not been given a say in anything. I also wanted to show how Minoo was forced to occupy two worlds at once well before she was equipped to: she was a child who needed her mother and a mother who needed her child.
SC: Minoo’s early years with her mother lead her to feel something that so many people—mothers or not—feel: a deep-rooted sense of being undeserving, along with the ramifications of that potent and destructive emotion—shame. Minoo succeeds in breaking that intergenerational trauma with her own daughter, Roya. She offers her a “warm hand to hold,” a “mouth for kisses,” and “deep space snuggles.” Can you tell us more about including this important theme of healing, and in particular, healing from shame, in your novel?
HG: While Minoo is a far cry from being self-aware, she excels at giving her daughter, Roya, physical affection. She’s playful, even as an adult. What Minoo is unable to articulate to her daughter in words and certain behaviors, she readily provides in affection and acceptance. It’s not enough, all things considered—Roya wants her mother to be available to talk honestly and directly with her, which Minoo is unable to do with any degree of regularity—but it’s more than she received from her own mother.
SC: For some mothers who write, the “creative” can feel like it’s competing with the “maternal.” Do you view Minoo’s puppet-making as a failure of her mothering, or as a necessary act of creative survival?
HG: Absolutely a necessary act of survival. It’s not a failure at all. She creates the puppets to better know herself. Unfortunately, she loses her way. But the impulse stems from a common creative impulse to better know oneself, one’s world, and one’s place within it.
SC: This novel explores so many important themes and, to me, the most significant ones are mother-daughter relationships and visceral realities of mental health. What has it been like for you, as a writer, a woman, and a mother, to explore these themes in your debut novel?
HG: It was great fun and incredibly consuming! By the time I sat down to write the novel, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to say, and where I was going, but the process helped me better grasp many loosely held beliefs. I think I have reinvigorated my respect for the power of play in our everyday lives. I also think that writing the novel has made me a more empathetic daughter and, I hope, a better mother as well.
SC: You write in so many genres—poetry, essays, short stories, and now a debut novel. How did writing a longer work of fiction feel different to you?
HG: Writing a novel was consuming. And when I say consuming, I don’t really even mean time-consuming, because writing anything is time-consuming. Writing poetry takes me longer than writing any other form. When I say writing the novel was consuming, what I mean is that I was consumed by another world for the year I wrote this novel. No matter what I was doing and no matter where I was, I was almost always thinking about Ecology Paul and Minoo. About Roya, and Minoo’s mother, and Minoo’s husband. I found this to be exhilarating, but also distracting and frustrating. I’m painfully aware I only get a brief flicker of time with my children as children, and I began to get agitated by the amount of time I was losing with them to write this novel. Even when I wasn’t sitting down in front of my computer or notepad and actively writing, I was passively thinking about it.
SC: What are you working on next?
HG: I’m working on a collection of poetry and a collection of personal travel essays. The essays should be out in 2027. The poetry collection is not complete yet and has not been submitted anywhere. I also have a children’s picture book slated to come out in spring 2027 with Guernica Editions. It will be illustrated by the excellent Santa Fe artist Catie Powe, whose art also graces my novel and short fiction collection.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.