Review: Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

My Quick Take: An arresting collection of short stories that weave a tapestry of threads in time that come together as a rich picture of women's lives, loves and losses.

Thanks to River Street Writing and Gordon Hill Press for a gifted copy.

***

The first thing I notice when I pick up Hollay Ghadery’s newest book Widow Fantasies is the beautiful cover art. By Catie Powe, the pastel-palette rendering of a fairground swing carousel evokes a nostalgia for happy times, the echo of a child’s joyous screams. The swings are empty, though, and the nostalgia is immediately tinged with a note of absence. There is visual texture to this art, and the next thing I notice is the feel of this book in my hands. The paper is finely textured, slightly sepia toned and I run my hands over it, anticipating the stories it will tell.

Ghadery is an Ontario-based writer whose mixed-race identity and mental health memoir Fuse (2021) has won awards, and I recently read her debut poetry collection Rebellion Box (2023), which I enjoyed very much. Widow Fantasies is her first short story collection.

The stories in Widow Fantasies are varied, yet wound together with common themes of love and loss, and of the small moments that define a relationship, or bring irrevocable change. The narrative is steeped in the feminine, giving glimpses of intimate moments in women's lives.

My recommendation is this: consider sitting down with the book when you have some time and read it straight through. If not that, perhaps over the course of a day, taking breaks to ponder the writing. The pieces that Ghadery offers are often the shortest of short stories, almost flash fiction length at times. Each contains a glimpse of a life, a moment in time. When read in succession, I got the curious feeling of watching a slideshow. Most stories are not related except by theme, but read carefully and you’ll see some of the same characters recur.

Here are some of the pictures/moments:

• The poignancy of time and the challenge of ageing in “Tarot of St. Petersburg,” as Mrs. Fellows, caring for her ailing husband, remembers the Mr. Fellows of years ago: “His shoulders in front of her in the stands of a county fair demolition derby. His shoulders packed tight as snow and thick as ice under a jean jacket. It’s hard for her to picture his shoulders, the way they were then. But Mrs. Fellows remembers there used to be a great distance between those shoulders that allowed her to move freely.”

• A moment in time bathed in impending grief and a frisson of guilty magical thinking in “Widow Fantasies”: “Years from now what Layla will remember most about that morning was how her breasts had been milk-swollen for days…She’ll remember how, the night before, Kent had heated cabbage leaves for her to put in her bra as relief, and how, even then, she’d wished he’d go away.”

• In “Waved” a mother’s longing to see things how they could be instead of how they are, as is the natural way of things: “A guard is leaning over him, his elbow propped on the back of Ben’s gurney…and I think, You know, if you took the two of them out of that room–if you removed the straps from Ben’s wrists and ankles, and placed him reclined, just as he is, on the deck of a cruise ship in a candy-cane striped lounge chair, and if you put the guard, just as he is, beside him, they’d look like lovers.”

• The unspeakable agony of reproduction and loss in the gentle and wonderful “Nothing Will Save Your Life, but This Might Buy You Time”: “‘Geo will want to try again,’ I say, ‘but he’s not the one…’ My thoughts drift, dainty willow wisps in a stream. Mellie pulls me closer. I swallow, try again. ‘He’s not the one who keeps ending up here.’”

And the book ends on an uproariously irreverent and suitably hopeful note with the short and funny “Tennis Whites.”

I could go on, seriously.

This collection is a bounty of small offerings that meets each character where they are: in that particular moment, in this particular situation, with one particular person, and in relationship with others or with themselves. The stories are astounding in their intimacy yet surprisingly broad in scope when read together as a whole. This is a collection that I will return to, and I suspect it's one that will offer up new insights with every visit.