Memoirist and poet, Hollay Ghadery has described her first book of fiction, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024) as “the result of my struggling to make sense of my fantasising about planning my husband’s funeral.” Not that she wants him dead, but rather because of her need for a more equitable partnership in her marriage, such are the circuitous paths of the psyche.
Widow Fantasies is a unique collection of micro-fictions where Ghadery condenses her narratives into semi-oblique snapshots. I say “semi-oblique” because as a reader I often felt I was wandering one of those circuitous paths of the psyche and found it necessary to retrace my steps with a second reading of some stories to get a clearer picture of what was going on.
This is not meant as criticism. Rather the opposite, as I found Ghadery’s angular approach to story telling refreshing in how it kept me on my toes and demanded my full attention.
By my count, there are 33 stories covering about 90 pages. Ghadery manages to weave commonplace themes of aging, friendship, fidelity, parenthood, identity, sexuality and mortality by shining a light on the murkier corners of human experience and exploring the extraordinary in the mundane. These stories tend to lean into the dictum that it is only through the particular that we can discover what is universal. What’s especially impressive in stories as compressed as these is their complexity, which is achieved in part through the visceral nature of Ghadery’s descriptive language. A good example is the opening paragraph of Caviar, where a woman discovers her husband pleasuring himself in the shower.
“If I swallow hard, the synthetic punch of his body wash is still in the back of my throat. My skin still puckers into gooseflesh. The heat of the shower is behind the closed door, but I can feel how it ribboned out to meet me.”
When we discover that they have been trying to conceive and are going the expensive IVF route, the sense of betrayal becomes palpable in this following section.
“The wet smacking sound of his hand pumping against himself.
A sickening slosh in my stomach. We had salmon for dinner because he read somewhere that it was good for my ovaries.
His furrowed brown and slick fish-lipped focus in the shower: I didn’t have to see his face to picture it. My legs spread wide in stirrups, body bare under thin blue gown and the heavy demand for more of me: more tests, more transparency. My eggs growing gills and the small store of dark mouths I have left inside me.”
Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery.
In Top Dog/Underdog two couples are in a van, returning home from a skiing holiday together. Marin is driving while her partner, Katie, is in the van’s middle row getting drunk on a wine cooler. In the front passenger seat is Amir, who is helping Marin navigate. In the van’s back row is Amir’s partner Dinah who sits with the sleeping pup Cyrus. Not much happens in this story, but when we find out that Dinah is a recovering alcoholic and that it was Marin and Katie who admitted her to the hospital with alcohol poisoning and that in the early stages of their courtship Amir stayed with her in the hospital, the bond between the four takes on a subtle poignancy beneath their post-holiday weariness.
We also discover that if not for Amir, Dinah’s son Isaac would have been taken away from her. The heart emojis that Amir and Dinah text each other only remind Dinah that being in recovery has taken its toll on her relationship with Amir.
“Love is need, and now that she’s sober, she doesn’t need him as much.”
The realization that love can become collateral damage in sobriety’s one-day-at-a-time seems to echo an earlier memory of Cyrus the pup killing a chipmunk during the holiday and laying the carcass at the skiers’ feet “like a waiter offering up a bottle of wine for a guest’s inspection.” This anecdote connects to the story’s ending when Dinah scratches under the dog’s chin and finds dried blood flaked onto her hand (presumably the chipmunk’s).
Such a stark open ending embodies the allure and the challenge of these stories. Their matter-of-fact style leaves enough space for mystery, allowing room for readers to crawl inside them, as uncomfortable as that is at times.
Anyone who has read Ghadery’s earlier books, the memoir Fuse (Guernica Editions’ Miroland Imprint, 2021) and the poetry collection Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023), knows that beneath her sleeve, she wears her heart close to the bone. These lean and hungry tales in Widow Fantasies are further proof of a talent to keep our eyes on.
Author of Widow Fantasies, Hollay Ghadery.
More about Hollay Ghadery:
Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian author living on Anishinaabe land in Ontario. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health (Guernica Editions, 2021) won a Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box (Radiant Press), was released in 2023 and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill), is forthcoming in fall 2024. She is the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com
Reviewer Steven Mayoff.
About Steven Mayoff:
Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. His acclaimed novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.