The Unravelling of Ou

By Hollay Ghadery

The Unravelling of Ou is a brilliant novel about family, shame, motherhood and love. To be honest, when I first heard about this novel and its unusual narrator, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, I didn’t know quite what to expect. Would it be campy? Was the silliness of a sock puppet meant simply as comic relief while social commentary lay on a deeper surface? Would it be a real sock puppet, or just an imaginary one, a metaphor of sorts? (Spoiler alert - it is real!) Or was there more to it than that?

There was more. Much more.

Through Ecology Paul, we meet the protagonist Minoo after she has faced an ultimatum from her grown daughter who has just had a baby - ditch the sock puppet, or there will be no contact. For years, Ecology Paul has lived on Minoo’s hand, or at least in close proximity. Although Minoo is desperate to connect with her daughter and new granddaughter, this is not a simple decision, but rather a reckoning where she must break from a reliance on an imaginary friend, face her pain, and find her own voice. Through Ecology Paul’s direct storytelling and in some cases, conversations with Minoo, we are folded into the past and recent events that have brought her to this point. While never being fully told from Minoo’s point of view, we are immersed in her internal world - ripe with struggles, fears, and the effects of loss.

This novel deals with many important issues including sexual identity, shame and exile, new ways to find belonging, and the complexity of love for lost family. Beyond that, it is also a brilliant examination of the psychological need humans have to separate ourselves from trauma and loss in order to cope. Although it is rare for this to be in such a physical manifestation as a puppet, its existence in Minoo’s story highlights how people so often attach their internal experience of trauma to something external - sometimes positively through mediums such as art or physical expression, but sometimes destructively through substances or other dependencies. Ecology Paul is a puppet, a combination of knots and ties and loops; a tangle of dependency that needs unravelling.

Perhaps it’s a metaphor after all.