Hollay Ghadery’s debut novel opens with a frazzled, middle-aged Minoo running down a hospital hallway with a handmade sock puppet slipped over her hand. Her daughter Roya has just given birth to a baby girl, but has ejected Minoo from the delivery room, frustrated by her mother’s long-standing dependence on the crudely made toy.

What unfolds is the heart-wrenching narrative of a woman abused and disregarded, her story unconventionally told from the perspective of the aforementioned support puppet. Humorously named Ecology Paul, the sock is one in a series of communication tools that Minoo has adopted throughout her troubled life to cope; “She’d created me—all of us—to help her make sense of herself,” the sock tells us. “We have always been an expression of feeling she could not otherwise articulate, or curiosity she couldn’t let herself otherwise explore: playfulness, sexiness, authority.”

The Unravelling of Ou’s storytelling method may seem bizarre, but it allows Ghadery to gracefully traverse a number of challenging themes with a lighthearted and accessible tone. Ecology Paul details the verbal abuse Minoo endured as a child from her cruel and judgmental mother, the trauma of Minoo’s teenage pregnancy in Iran, and how she was painfully separated from her child and sent away to Canada. “Minoo was never so ashamed of who she was until she saw herself through the eyes of her mother,” the sock explains.

While shame marks many of Minoo’s life experiences, we are also given a window into moments of brave self exploration. Ecology Paul gives voice to a life marked by the desire to be free, and explains how, despite that desire, Minoo ended up in that hospital hallway, unable to let go of her communication crutch. “I was here because Minoo was too scared to be,” he tells us. By lifting Minoo’s fear, however temporarily, the sock puppet allows Minoo to explore what has long been denied to her, and to ask questions about a body that has felt like “a wound she’d had to endure.”

Ghadery is at her most moving when she articulates the bond between mother and child, able to capture the inexplicable, near painful intensity with beautiful, precise language. “Minoo remembered her mother’s hand enveloping her smaller one as they crossed the street,” she writes of a memory from before Minoo’s mother turned cruel. “For a time, life had been so gentle. Gentle as her lips on the mid-leg fold of her baby’s thigh. She could feel the warmth of their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek, in sleep. Her baby.”

The Unravelling of Ou is a tender, generous story about the sometimes strange and unsanctioned ways we cope with what we’ve been dealt, but it’s also about the ability of love and compassion to transcend even the most painful of histories. Minoo is well served by her unconventional coping mechanism, but she also proves her resilience by moving on and forward into a life that finally belongs to her.