Sharing her stories, and theirs too: My conversation with Hollay Ghadery on “Widow Fantasies”
Hollay Ghadery’s short story collection Widow Fantasies (pictured above) provides a diverse, fascinating, and dynamic exploration into “the shadowed lives of girls and women,” as described in the book’s description.
In this part of my conversation with Hollay Ghadery, we examine her short story collection Widow Fantasies (2024). We discuss the genesis of the book, explore how the collection came together, and how the stories in the book alternated between highly personal and universal.
What's the Idea: Where did the idea for Widow Fantasies come from?
Hollay Ghadery: My husband was pissing me off. I'd been married seven years, had a bunch of kids, and I was tired of doing the second shift, having a job, taking care of the house, taking care of everybody's medical appointments, taking care of bills; I was just so tired of doing everything. And so I started fantasizing. It's actually hinted at in a poem I wrote, "Psychomachia.” There's a line in that poem about unruly thighs in the hardware store thinking about rat poison.
“I thought these weren’t normal thoughts to be having, and it turned out they were very normal thoughts and that there was actually a term for this, which is widow fantasies. It affects many women in traditional heteronormative relationships where the domestic labor falls mostly on them.”
That's my first expression of the frustration I was feeling about having these babies and feeling tired and feeling this heteronormative bullshit. These divisions of domestic labor were not working, I needed help, and I didn't know how to ask for it for many reasons. The woman doing the majority of the housework is what I'd seen modeled everywhere else. And I was newly sober and my husband had put up with so much for me. He had stuck with me through so much and I felt like I owed him, so I felt like I really shouldn't be complaining about this. He never said anything to that effect. That was just all within me, this intense guilt.
So, I started having these fantasies. Not about doing anything to hurt my husband, but about my husband having an accident at work, and how lovely and freeing it would be just to not be married anymore. I didn't want the messiness of a divorce, because then he'd still be around and he'd take my babies away from me, or I'd have to share custody of my babies, which I didn't want. I wanted them all to myself. I just wanted him not to be around anymore, and I was hoping some quick and painless end would make it all go away. So I spoke to my therapist, because I thought these weren’t normal thoughts to be having, and it turned out they were very normal thoughts and that there was actually a term for this, which is widow fantasies. It affects many women in traditional heteronormative relationships where the domestic labor falls mostly on them.
I started writing about what it was like, and I also had a really great conversation with my husband, though that didn’t make it into the book. So I was in a space where I could investigate these stories that I wanted to investigate without just being angry or unnecessarily morbid. That was seven years ago, and we've been married almost 16, so obviously everything's good. He wasn't upset about any of it. He was very responsive.
What's the Idea: Was your real life an inspiration for the stories?
Hollay: I think people who've read somebody's memoir before they read something like this tend to think all these stories are about your life, and they're not at all. The idea of a widow fantasy and having one, and then learning how many other women have these kinds of fantasies, that was definitely based in my life, but the stories were just stories. There aren’t always roots of my life there, though like many authors, my life does inform the writing. There’s one story where a woman has a nub cut off her tongue and that is one hundred percent my life, but that's an exception to the rule. Most of these stories are not autofictional. Again, they might be flavoured by something someone said to me or an experience I had, but the whole story is not a snapshot of my life.
What's the Idea: Did you know right away that you were writing a short story collection?
Hollay: “tarot of st. petersburg” was published years and years and years ago in Room Magazine, and the flash fiction incarnation of it was published in Carousel, so that was the first story written for the collection. At that point, I had no clue what I was writing a collection at all.
What's the Idea: “tarot of st. petersburg” was an interesting, beautiful meditation on a long marriage and the associated love and devotion. It played an interesting part in Widow Fantasies.
Hollay: There are many ways to have widow fantasies. Sometimes it is because you're in a horrible abusive relationship. And then sometimes, like for me, nobody is intentionally trying to hurt anyone else, it’s a breakdown of communication, and that was our issue. It wasn't even really a him problem. It was a both of us issue that we were having. But “tarot of st. petersburg” kind of riffs off the same idea of how you can love someone and just want to be free, especially when you've been a caregiver for someone for a long time. It's a lot.
“I really wanted to make sure that I showed different perspectives and different experiences and really tapped into that empathetic part of myself and that very spongy nucleus of who I am.”
That story was inspired by when I used to be a personal trainer. One of my clients was talking about going to a psychic fair, and the psychic told her that her husband would pass soon, and they were like, “Finally. I didn't marry this person.” She was in her late 80s at the time, and she was so looking forward to living her life again and getting on with her second life. I don't know what ended up happening, but she was exhausted. She loved him, but she'd been caregiving for him for so long that she was just tired.
What's the Idea: How did you go about writing this book? Did it take a long time to write?
Hollay: No, under a year. I wrote every single day. Sometimes I did a story a day and then would go back and edit and stuff, but they came quite quickly. There was no shortage of ideas running through my mind going from this angle.
I wanted to make sure there were very inclusive ideas of womanhood. I despise how this child-free movement, which is a completely valid movement, and the trad wife mother movement seem to pit women against each other. It's like, you can do whatever you want. Stop arguing amongst yourselves. We're upholding the patriarchy! That's what the patriarchy does. It has us fighting amongst ourselves instead of dealing with the bigger issues. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom and bake cookies and do laundry, amazing. But I don't believe that kids complete you. You have to be whole by yourself. I've said frequently I can envision a life in which I did not have kids, but I cannot envision a life in which I wasn't some kind of artist. I really wanted to make sure that I showed different perspectives and different experiences and really tapped into that empathetic part of myself and that very spongy nucleus of who I am. I wrote stories from the many different people that I have been and maybe will be my whole life. There are 33 stories in total, and I think I nailed most perspectives.
I wanted stories from the perspective of younger women, girls, and, there's one from the perspective of patio furniture, for God's sake. And it's not just straight women. I'm not straight. I happen to be married to a dude, but I'm not straight, so I really wanted to make sure that there was that queer representation in there, too. I've definitely shied away from dealing with that in my other books, because I was like, “I shouldn't take up space in that community because I'm married to this man. I shouldn't take up space there.” But I think that contributes to bisexual erasure. So yeah, I'm beginning to take up space, and this story takes up space there. Not every story is a queer story, but I’m less interested in somebody's sexual orientation than who they are.
What's the Idea: Speaking of the various perspectives, “jaws” was an interesting opening piece as a woman's personal story filtered through her pet fish, and the difference of how her husband reacted to the fish.
“I still don’t know what happened to Jaws. But this gave me a way to work out a story where at least my character knew what happened to her fish.”
Hollay: I really had a close relationship with one of my Nowruz fish, so that's where that story started. I think goldfish are like fresh cut flowers. You're not used to them lasting that long after Nowruz, which is Persian New Year, during which the fish is kind of like getting a Christmas tree. It's part of the decoration. They usually don't live that long, but Jaws stuck around for years, so we put them in our pond, and then I had such guilt about that. I still don’t know what happened to Jaws. But this gave me a way to work out a story where at least my character knew what happened to her fish.
What's the Idea: That's really interesting to use art to create closure. Were there any stories that made you know you were moving in the right direction or that really inspired you along the way?
Hollay: Definitely the title story, “Widow Fantasies.” The one about the little girl with her scorpion drawing got put in after the book was accepted for publication. I just kind of slid that in at the last minute.
“Waved” was a pretty old story. I was reading about the death penalty in the [United] States and other places that had the death penalty, but I was focused on the States. I thought about how much we love our kids, and then I was reading this firsthand account of a mother who watched her son be put to death in the electric chair, and how somebody in the room whooped the way somebody would when their team scored a touchdown in a football game.
The story exists in this exploration of victims and how the families of the people being executed are victims too, and the effects that this had on these people. I was really interested in that perspective of the mother's response to what was happening, and how she created this little fantasy around what was happening. Because, I mean, that's her baby. That's somebody's child, and two families have lost someone now. I’m not justifying the violence or anything like that, but justice usually comes at a cost. Justice often leaves a blood trail.
I was really worried because so many of my stories felt very Canadian centered, at least to me, and then I had this story about the death penalty, but my editor said, "Don't worry about it." They said it being in Canada is in my head because I live in Canada and that's where I picture it, but I didn't actually reference one specific place throughout the book— Toronto and surrounding rural areas were definitely my frame of reference for the stories—but the stories could be set anywhere, technically. I was like, "Okay, that's fine.”
What's the Idea: Even then, the story is about looking at the mother's grief, the mother's experience of this event. You can substitute the death penalty for anybody who loses their child, regardless of the situation.
Hollay: The idea of one of my kids not being there anymore makes me want to burn the world down.So I really wanted that perspective. Even when your child does something unspeakable and heinous, that's still your baby.
“I feel like sometimes the book was a community effort, in so far as it was like a baby shower of ideas but for my book, where these people rallied around me and gave me ideas.”
What's the Idea: Did you accomplish what you wanted to with this book?
Hollay: Yeah, absolutely. I'm really, really happy with it, and I had tons of fun writing it. I had tons of fun with other women sharing their stories, which made it into the books in various transmuted forms. I actually had some women gift me stories when they found out I was writing this.They would say things like “You have to tell my story,” or “I read this article about this country club that has a tennis whites policy, you should write about it.” And they sent me a link to that article, which became the last story in the collection. It’s about a new rule at a country club that says you have to wear tennis whites, and women have to wear skirts. That actually was a fairly recent news story at a country club in Canada, so I wrote a story about it. I feel like sometimes the book was a community effort, in so far as it was like a baby shower of ideas but for my book, where these people rallied around me and gave me ideas.
I think my favorite story in the collection, though, is “nothing will save your life, but this might buy you time,” which is the one about miscarriages and has the character of Mellie. I don't know where she came from, but she felt like a gift. I just love the character of Mellie, she was fun. I did get a sensitivity reader for her because I'm not a trans woman, so I wanted to make sure that I dealt with her with sensitivity. She wasn't even the central character, but she was incredibly central to the person dealing with the loss of another fetus.
Ghadery’s story collection contains both her own truths and a wider examination of the many things it can mean to be a woman.
That story came to me after reading Svetlana Stalin's biography, Stalin’s Daughter. There was a part of it that detailed the story of her wearing a pencil skirt and wanting to take her own life, but the pencil skirt was so tight she couldn't get up on the bridge. I was like, the patriarchy won't even let us kill ourselves properly. It shoves us into these impossible skirts that we can't walk, sit, or even throw ourselves off a bridge in. It felt like such an absurd and comic and tragic story in this book. There was no commentary about the skirt in the biography at all. It was just a story that Svetlana recounted. I'm the one who was like, “This is ridiculous. Damn it.” It’s not that I wish she was gone, but simply that it felt like this woman just wanted something for herself and it was being taken away from her.
What's the Idea: I thought your story “caviar” was incredibly intimate and almost read like a beautiful fusion of poetry via the form of a short story.
River Street Writing: I think a lot about women's bodies in medical settings. Even when I was giving birth, I was just straight naked. They took all my clothes off me. Why did I have to be completely naked to do that? And with all these people in the room, I felt so out of control. Birth already made me feel out of control of my own body, because this thing was happening independently of me. This didn’t happen with all of my births. I had different people for every single birth because I moved. But for one of them in particular, I really just felt like, I don't need to be this exposed and cold in a room full of people.
So I was thinking about that, and my husband and I had just gotten a sliding wood door. That part was personal, the door, though we didn't spend $400 at an antique market like the characters do. I was thinking a lot about how women's bodies are subject to all this medical poking and prodding, but dudes can kind of just do whatever they want and are taken more seriously. It was based on my experience with pregnancy and just personal feelings I had. I can't say I ever set out to write a piece about walking in on my husband masturbating in the shower, but there you go.
I think it also loops back to communication breakdowns between people, which was kind of at the heart of where the book started with me, of situations where, on one hand, who cares that you've done this? Who cares that I've seen this? It's not that big of a deal. But on the other hand, it is a big deal when everyone has access to your body and your desire and your feelings. In the case of the story, the tension is not about this one act: the masturbating. It's about everything. And I think as women, we’re complacent. We think we’re blowing this one thing out of proportion so we shut up.. But it's not this one thing. We are often reacting to decades of everything. It’s just one thing that broke us at that moment. So I think “caviar” was a very short way for me to explore that. Props to Sledgehammer magazine who published it for me. That was really nice of them.
What's the Idea: Thanks for all this time explaining the story and process behind writing Widow Fantasies and your other books.
River Street Writing: Thank you so much. You've given me all the space to talk about all these books, and that is actually not something that happens a lot. So I do want to thank you.
If you haven’t read them yet, check out my previous conversations with Ghadery. We spoke about her memoir Fuse (2021), as well as her poetry collection Rebellion Box (2023).
Widow Fantasies is available for purchase directly from Radiant Press as well as your local bookstore. Follow Hollay Ghadery on Instagram to stay up to date on her latest projects or contact her if you have any questions.
The interview was recorded using Google Meet in May 2025.
Transcription edited by Matthew Long, with additional copy editing by Anthony Nijssen of APT Editing..
All photos are the property of Hollay Ghadery except the goldfish photo, which is by zhengtao tang on Unsplash.