Heart Close to Bone: Steven Mayoff reviews Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

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.

Power Q & A with Anna Rosner

Having a middle-grade author on our blog is a first for us, and we are delighted to kick off what will hopefully be the first of many middle-grad lit features with Anna Rosner, the award-winning author of Eyes on the Ice (Groundwood Books, 2024).

This story follows ten-year-old Lukas and his brother Denys, who want nothing more than to play hockey, but it’s 1963, and they live in Czechoslovakia, where everyone is on the lookout for spies of the state.

This is a thrilling read, and one young readers have been enjoying.

Welcome to the Power Q & A series, Anna!

Eyes on the Ice by Anna Rosner.

Q: What is the importance of historical fiction in the high-speed world of young readers today?

A: In his 2015 article from Le Devoir, “Our era traps us in immediacy” (Notre époque nous enferme dans l’immédiateté), Marc Chabot explains that everything in our lives is instantaneous. He laments our detachment from history and literature, or “the permanent”. And this was in 2015, before the creation of TikTok! The immediacy problem has increased exponentially in the past decade. We view thousands of fleeting images, read copious online news bites, and stare blankly at Tweets and videos. We forget scandals and tragedies the moment they are replaced by new scandals and tragedies. It’s almost impossible to navigate this fast-paced world of “now”, and it’s that much harder for a young person.

Which leads me to reading. My years as a doctoral student were easily the calmest of my life, which runs contrary to the experiences of most students. During that time, I lived in books, the primary sources written 300-400 years ago. Reading those early works taught me so much: how women lived, how class systems functioned, how revolutions came to be. I engaged with my work slowly, leisurely, gathered information, and thought about one single sentence for a week or more.

When we encourage a child to read from a young age, their attention span increases. A good book enables them to leave this world of Instagram and the immediate, and take a long, deep breath. Turning a page can be therapeutic. Through the written word, children can visit and learn about places that would otherwise be unknown to them; places that are impossible to grasp in a fifteen second video. Studying history in school can be a challenge for young people, especially when they are obligated to memorize facts and statistics for exams. But when they read historical fiction, it’s less of a struggle. Historical fiction transports the child back in time, teaches them about where we came from and where we went afterwards. It helps them connect past and present. The narrative is history, written in a child’s voice, and it makes learning so much easier. Which is what I hope I accomplished in Eyes on the Ice. Those who read the book won’t be able to explain the effects of Stalin’s tyranny, but they’ll have a general understanding of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. And it’s stories that we remember best.

Author Anna Rosner.

More about Anna Rosner:

ANNA ROSNER is a teacher and writer who holds a PhD in French literature. She is the award-winning author of two hockey biographies for young readers — Journeyman: The Story of NHL Right Winger Jamie Leach and My Left Skate: The Extraordinary Story of Eliezer Sherbatov. Anna is the director of Books with Wings, which provides new, quality picture books for Indigenous children living in isolated communities. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.

BOOK REVIEW: The Home Stretch: A Father, a Son, and All the Things They Never Talk About

The Home Stretch: A Father, a Son, and All the Things They Never Talk About, by George K. Ilsley. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020. ISBN: 9781551527956. $19.95, 230 pages.

Review by Marion Agnew.

“There is only one way this story is going to turn out.”

Everyone has parents. Everyone’s parents die. Yet the stories where parents and death intersect are unique. 

George K. Ilsley’s recent memoir tells one such story. As a young adult, George left his Nova Scotia home, heading west, eventually landing in Vancouver—as far away as he could get while remaining in North America. Then, as he turns 50, his father turns 90, and his father needs, but doesn’t especially want, Ilsley’s care. 

Narrated in a gently self-deprecating voice, this book was surprisingly funny and a pleasure to read—not easy, mind, but a pleasure. 

Available to purchase wherever books are sold. Grab it from Arsenal Pulp Press.

Part of my pleasure comes from recognition. I had similar experiences with my mother, whose death from dementia came twenty years ago, and with my father, who died seven years later. I, too, lived far away from them, and my siblings, for various reasons, weren’t able to take a more active role as our parents aged. So much of what Ilsley describes was familiar, especially the push-pull of leaving a life you’ve built to spend time with a parent, always feeling guilty for not being in the other place. 

But this book has much to offer beyond any personal identification with its situation. It’s also a good example of how the untidy elements of nonfiction make the nonfiction interesting. Writers often try softening memories to make them more palatable or changing events to “fit” a traditional narrative arc. The biggest temptation is to manufacture something “inspirational” or “redeeming” in an account of a difficult time with a difficult person with whom you had a difficult relationship—to say, “It was all worthwhile, because ….” 

Deftly, Ilsley avoids these temptations. Everyone else thinks his father is sweet, with a quirky tendency to save things and a charming, if odd, interest in growing peanuts. But Ilsley shows his father’s serious hoarding issues, his disinterest in the reality of others’ lives, his unhealthy obsessions with peanuts and long underwear. We see the dangers present in Ilsley’s father’s stubborn refusal to answer direct questions, his denial that he needs help with walking and eating, and his bitterness when his sons try to help. Nothing soft there.

And no tidy redemption story, either. The last time George sees his father, who’s in the hospital, Ilsley says, “There is, of course, a last scene with Dad in the hospital, tray-locked in his chair, him confused and me sad. Wondering if this is the last time, as I have wondered so many times, with increasing levels of certainty.” But Ilsley can’t know whether this actually is the last time—he’s experienced years of anticipatory grief, waves of anger and sadness, and even moments of acceptance. 

All relationships in a family change as parents age, and I admire the honesty with which Ilsley shares his family’s difficulties and silences. He describes a moment with his older brother, who lives with their father: “It is hard to be fifty years old and treated like children by a parent whose welfare consumes our time, energy, and money.” 

In fact, the book’s great strength is its insight and candour about the kaleidoscope of emotions involved in loving someone who doesn’t want to be cared for, but who needs it. Anger alone takes many forms: exasperation, impatience, truculence, stubbornness meeting stubbornness. 

Fear, too, has many facets. You’re afraid for your parent’s safety and for your ability to survive their suffocating needs. You dread being happy when they die; you dread their death will kill you, too. You’re terrified that all your efforts won’t help make their lives bearable at the end, and that you’ll leave something undone that could have made a huge positive difference in their last years. 

But then again, you know—we all do—that there’s only one way this story is going to turn out. 

Anyone who’s ever had parents, and anyone who loves the creative chaos of real life, will find rewards in reading this book. 

About Marion:
Marion Agnew’s essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s, came out in 2019. For more about her, see www.marionagnew.ca.

Marion Agnew.