The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery

Reviewed by Wayne Ng

If mastery of an art form is like growing a limb of imagination, then Hollay Ghadery has several arms. From memoir to poetry, flash fiction to long form, she wields each with striking control and instinct. Her latest work, The Unravelling of Ou, fuses them all—a novel that grips the reader like a hand around the throat of a secret. From its fragmented opening lines, the book disorients: a work of prose that moves like poetry, confession, and hallucination all at once. To read it is to inhabit a consciousness that resists linearity, coherence, and the comfort of traditional narrative. It’s a destabilizing, electrifying ride, a magic mushroom read.

At its center is Ou, a figure of liminality. Ou is both literal and symbolic—a sock puppet, yes a sock puppet, born of trauma and alienation, a vessel for all that Minoo, the protagonist, cannot bear to articulate. Minoo is a mother and daughter, burdened by histories that cling like a second skin, their unresolved grief bleeding into addiction, memory, and selfhood. Ghadery renders them in flux, unravelling under the pressures of motherhood, identity, and desire. They are not just falling apart but refusing to be neatly stitched together. The unravelling, here, is not collapse—it is survival. It is the radical act of staying uncontained.

The novel’s form mirrors its emotional terrain. Minoo unravels as her daughter, Roya is about to give birth. She gives her mother an ultimatum. Lose the puppet or walk away for good. Ou narrates the backstory, revealing layers of unresolved hurt and misses. Sentences jut and stutter. Paragraphs splinter into white space before gathering themselves again. The prose is lush yet raw, at times searingly lyrical, at others clipped and desperate. Ghadery’s voice has that rare duality: both confessional and crafted, intimate enough to feel whispered into your ear yet sharp enough to draw blood.

Though Ou eschews traditional storytelling, narrative threads do shimmer beneath the chaos—love and lust, compulsion and recovery, the failures and fierce bonds of family. Reality and dream overlap until neither can be told apart. Minoo’s story is less told than embodied; each page is an enactment of a psyche teetering between coherence and collapse. Reading becomes an immersive, sometimes disorienting experience—precisely Ghadery’s point. Yet at times, unexpected potholes of hilarity jump out. Like when Minoo’s daughter, Roya, is furious with her mother for driving down the main street with Ou in her hand in plain sight, blaring Queen and singing loudly. Or when Ou describes other puppets such as the purple cat beside the fancy Royal Albert plates on the kitchen hutch shelves, or Tinker, a cow made from one of her husband’s gym socks,

What makes The Unravelling of Ou most resonant is how Ghadery collapses the distance between beauty and ugliness, shame and desire, sanity and madness. Everything is tangled, knotted together in one shimmering, painful skein. This hybridity is not only aesthetic but political. In a world still hungry for clean categories—male or female, straight or queer, sane or broken, addict or recovered—Ou insists on multiplicity. It claims the right to be contradictory, unresolved, alive. The novel’s form becomes a declaration: that fragmentation, too, can be a kind of wholeness.

That defiance, however, comes at a cost. The density of Ghadery’s style—its recursive circling of compulsion, obsession, and self-interrogation—can, at moments, risk opacity. Some readers' footing may slip in the fog of repetition. But even in these moments, the prose hums with conviction. It is a challenge, not a flaw: Ghadery demands that her audience meet her work on its own terms, surrendering to rhythm rather than expecting resolution. For those who do, the reward is immense—a voice that is by turns brutal, tender, and profoundly alive.

What lingers after closing the book is its fearless honesty. As in her previous works, Ghadery writes without flinching about shame, addiction, and the ambivalence of motherhood—the fierce love and the quiet despair that coexist within it. There’s courage in this exposure, but also generosity. By unravelling on the page, Ou gives permission for readers to confront their own fractures and contradictions.

The Unravelling of Ou joins a growing lineage of hybrid, experimental works that blur the personal and political, yet Ghadery’s voice remains singular—rooted in the specificity of being racialized, queer, and female in a world that demands simplicity from the marginalized.

Ultimately, The Unravelling of Ou is a high-risk, high-reward read. It is witnessing a writer with an exemplary literary compass who is at the height of her craft. It may alienate readers who crave conventional structure, but it will haunt those who surrender to its cadence. It is brave, necessary, unforgettable. By refusing to be whole, Ghadery reveals a more radical wholeness—one stitched from fragments, contradictions, and survival.

The Unravelling of Ou is published by Palimpsest Press