Heather Aimee O'Neill Pierces the Surface of Family Tragedy in 'The Irish Goodbye'

In her debut novel, The Irish Goodbye, poet, teacher, and writing coach Heather Aimee O’Neill tells the story of three sisters still grappling with a tragedy that occurred twenty years earlier. Because of this devastating event, their brother, Topher’s, life was deeply impacted. Set on the North Shore of Long Island, the novel begins with the three sisters – Cait, Alice, and Maggie – who return home for Thanksgiving after several years apart. During the visit, Cait decides to invite someone from their past, causing old issues to resurface that the family must confront. Meanwhile, the other sisters carry their own burdens, with Alice dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and Maggie facing the challenging introduction of her girlfriend to Nora, her devout, Catholic mother. For O’Neill, “What I wanted to explore in this family was the impact that this accident has on Topher, and then Topher’s struggle to process that and the shame that he endures as a result of that. The collateral damage is significant for him and for the family…”

As readers may observe, a sense of grief and melancholy permeates throughout The Irish Goodbye. This is because O’Neill had initially set out to write a book about grief that centered around the events of September 11th. “…[9/11] is something that my family did experience. We lost a lot of people in the terrorist attack… my father’s company was on the 104th floor of the south tower. He wasn’t there, but his company lost 66 employees including a lot of my friends, a lot of my sister’s friends, our cousin, Peter, obviously a lot of people my father loved dearly… it was a really tragic, tragic day for us… grief can be really insidious and I always knew that that was something I wanted to write about. I just didn’t know exactly… what the story was and so when I did realize what the story was going to be for the Ryan family, a lot of things began to click for me there because I, kind of, found a way in.”