Heather Aimee O'Neill, THE IRISH GOODBYE: A Novel

[1:50]Zibby Owens: This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. I recorded this episode with Heather Amy O'Neill at our Zibby's Greenwich retreat, which was so much fun. And we had a bunch of authors come, and Athena Books hosted us for a bunch of talks, and then we all had lunch next door. We'll be doing more of these in the future, but was so honored to have Heather there. Let me tell you more about her. Heather, Amy O'Neill, is the author of The Irish Goodbye, a novel, which is the Jenna's Book Club pick. Heather is a poet, a teacher, and the assistant director of the Saket Street Writers Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and two sons. The Irish Goodbye is her first novel. Welcome, Heather. Thanks so much for coming on Totally Booked. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Congratulations. Since we booked this podcast and everything, The Irish Goodbye became a read with Jenna Pick. So exciting.

[3:23]Heather Aimee O'Neill: Yeah. Very exciting. Well, you must have known about this for a long time. I I found out in May. Woah. Yeah, so I've been holding it as a secret essentially for five months. My editor, Sarena, called me and told me and I was just shocked and thrilled and I think I screamed. My older son came into the room to make sure everything was okay and I went to tell him, and Serena was on the other line saying, You can't tell anybody. Oh. And I was like, Oh gosh, okay. So they did let me tell. I'll tell a young child. That's fine. Yeah, he's not that young, he's 18 and we've been thrilled to share it with everyone. But I was allowed to tell my wife, so my wife and I have kind of held this. But I didn't tell, the joke is, and I'm serious, I didn't tell my mom, my sisters, my therapist, I didn't tell everybody. Wow. I know, I'm very, I'm good with secrets, which if you've read the book or if you plan to read the book, the sisters have a lot of secrets.

[4:14]Zibby Owens: Was gonna tie it in. Was gonna get there, actually. Tell everybody what your book is about. My book is about three sisters who are returning

[4:22]Heather Aimee O'Neill: to their home on the North Fork Of Long Island, speaking of locations. Yes. And when the older sister invites someone from their past to the dinner, the family is forced to confront a tragedy that's haunted them for years. And are we allowed to know about the tragedy? I know it unfolds. What can we know upfront about what happened? Yeah. So, I know it's hard to I was at a reading yesterday, last night, with one of my teachers and friends, Victoria Riddell and Michael Cunningham, and he was talking about how it's so hard to talk about books without giving away the secrets. But I don't think it's giving too much away to say that the tragedy that they are kind of working through, still working through over a decade later is the loss of their brother to suicide. And that experience has kind of paralyzed them all in unique ways and is showing up at this particular moment in time over the weekend. Kind of one of the questions of the book is what contributed to the brothers' downward spiral. And that's another tragedy, actually, which you get in the opening pages. But I think a more important question is, are these sisters going to be able to come together and find forgiveness and take off their masks and really allow for the kind of intimacy

[5:49]Zibby Owens: and vulnerability that grieving requires to move through? And there's also a thread of how the tragedy affected each sister and impacted their lives and their development. You have a quote later on in the book where you are talking about exactly this. It says, Maggie, who's one of the sisters. Maggie wiped the tears from her face and stood irritated. Of course, she said, but maybe wait. Let me back up. Hold on one sec. Alice passed a tissue to Maggie then turned to them both. Do you ever think about who we would be if none of this had ever happened? She asked. Maggie wiped the tears from her face and stood irritated. Of course, she said, but maybe we'd be exactly the same. Maybe we've always been this way. We'll never know. And then she goes on to say, I mean, mom let this sit in her closet and haunt her for years when she could have just faced it and maybe even found some healing in it. Instead, she hid it away, stuffed it down, you know, like we all do, like Topher did, until everything implodes. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I

[6:51]Heather Aimee O'Neill: I don't know if I doubt I'm alone in this, but I have had experiences in my life. We were talking earlier about coming of age, not just being something that happens when you're an adolescent, but kind of throughout your life. And I think, you know, I also have sisters, and I've had different moments in my relationship with them where, you know, when we go home, we all regress. We all turn into our younger selves, I think, to some degree. But particularly with our siblings, I think there is an experience of meeting each other over and over again and kind of being reminded like, Oh, you're an adult out in the world, and you're not this young kid, or I'm the youngest, so I'm always thinking of my older sisters. But with these sisters, because I felt like they were really stuck in their grief, I was aware that I didn't want the story itself to be stuck, that I wanted it to be about them finding this way forward. And sometimes to do that, you do need to be shocked. You do need a stranger from the past to come in and shake things up. And the older sister, Kate, I loved writing her. She's, to me, an interesting character because she's holding a secret that's connected to the brother's death, but she's also, at the same time, the character that kind of calls everybody else out. So she's wearing this mask and she's very protective of her own secret, but she is very willing to say the thing no one else will say. And that does, I mean, it's upsetting to the family and shocking, but it does move things forward. Sometimes that's necessary,

[8:46]Zibby Owens: I think. And all three of the sisters really feel responsible in some way. Yeah. Also highlights no one is essentially responsible ever for what happens in the world. A suicide, a plane crash is in one of the other books.

[9:03]Heather Aimee O'Neill: Talk about that a little bit and how they all wrestle with that. Yeah, I think So I originally began writing this book about September 11. My family experienced a lot of personal loss in the terrorist attacks. And I was about six months into writing it, and I just thought, I can't write about this. It's too personal. I didn't want to spend time in that pain. Was kind of shortly after that, I was at an event with my wife for the JED Foundation, which is this incredible organization that provides resources for suicide prevention to college campuses.

[9:43]Zibby Owens: I've been to an event for this. Have you? Yeah. I've been in I know somebody who knew J. T. Okay. And now I can't remember who, but if you're listening. Yeah,

[9:52]Heather Aimee O'Neill: it's an extraordinary organization. And I know people who've died by suicide. I think most people know someone who died by suicide. And listening to these stories, I thought, is something that I have experience with, but I also feel like I can kind of spend the time that's gonna be required to really unpack it in the story. And so once I picked that and figured out who the sisters were going to be and how the loss was going to affect them specifically, things kind of took off. But really began with identifying what source is of loss here? And I think particularly with suicide, guilt can have can play a role in that. And but I think also in any tragedy, that's there's always this kind of reverse engineering of, If only I had done that, if only I didn't leave the house then, or If only this happened. I think that's a really natural part of grief. So that

[10:50]Zibby Owens: definitely played an important role. So we first connected via DMs and Instagram about our experiences with nineeleven. Can you share, do you mind talking a little bit more about it and your family's involvement and just how that affected you and exactly sort of what happened with you? Yeah. My father's company was on the 104th Floor of the South Tower. He was out of town, but he lost 66 employees, including

[11:15]Heather Aimee O'Neill: a lot of our friends and family. My cousin died. And it such a tremendous loss. And I got to see the impact of grief on so many different levels, on the level of community, nationally on the level of community, certainly on the level of family, friends, and on the individual self, on my father. But I will say, I come from an Irish Catholic family and humor is a big part of it. Don't know if anyone here is Irish, but there you go. That also was an important part of the experience of grief, was like, How are we going to move through this? So I wanted that to be a part of the story as well. What are the elements of resilience for this family? And a lot of that I pulled from the experience I had

[12:13]Zibby Owens: of that loss. And how old were you at the time? Not to reveal your age. Yeah, no, was in my early twenties. Okay. It's hard to get grief on the page in explore such a beautiful way, but you absolutely do that in Oh, this thank you. Tell us a little bit more about all the backstories of the characters and why you chose that. You have Maggie who's a school teacher, you're a teacher, she has just made a mistake. There are lots of secrets and mistakes. Yeah, lots of mistakes. Well, maybe I shouldn't call it a mistake. Why don't you talk about it? She is just Okay. Yeah, so Maggie is the It's three sisters. Maggie is the youngest sister and

[12:50]Heather Aimee O'Neill: she teaches at a boarding school in Vermont and she's bringing her girlfriend, Isabelle, home for the first time. And her mother is very Catholic and this is obviously going to be a conflict. And Maggie has recently had an indiscretion with an ex girlfriend and that's kind of showing up over this weekend. So she's dealing with a lot of things. But to your point, yes, it was a mistake, but it was a mistake that taught her And there's a lot of mistakes that happen in this book. The original tragedy is kind of mistake. And one of the main things that I wanted people to take away from the book was to have more forgiveness and more compassion and more understanding that people make mistakes and they shouldn't be defined by their mistakes. I started writing this in 2020 and just continued to feel so tired of our lack of compassion for each other and our willingness to just publicly call somebody out and that's it. And I was like, God, we're all such nuanced, complex people that if you catch us at any moment in our life, it may not show the best of us. And so much of us, so many of us, all of us, have to make mistakes in order to learn something. So rather than be defined by our mistakes, allow the growth to come. So I was feeling particularly frustrated on a cultural level about how we were not allowing that for each other. So that became more and more important to me in the book. And with Maggie, Maggie, this isn't giving much away to say she finds her brother. This is such a traumatic experience for And again, kind of paralyzes her in the way of intimacy. And so I think when Isabelle comes into her life, she is a character who is able to show Maggie another side of herself, and that's incredibly intimidating to Maggie. And so she, you know, there's some self sabotage there, you know? But she had to do it in order to learn the lesson. So for me, the real question was, what is going to be the consequence of that? And is Isabelle going to forgive her? I also really loved Isabelle, and I was like, I don't know, Isabelle, do you forgive her? Then the middle sister Alice is the kind of caretaker of the family. She stayed, she moved back home to the town after her brother died. And she's a mother and her husband is a principal at a Catholic school and he's very religious. And Alice is dealing with something that really threatens her marriage and she has to make a choice. And then the oldest sister, Kate, lives in London and she's recently divorced. She's kind of a high power attorney and she's returning for the first time in five years. And she carries this secret about how she feels responsible for her brother's death. Through the process of this weekend, she learns new things again, able to, her journey is, will she be able to confront the mistakes that she made, forgive herself,

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[18:36]Zibby Owens: So the middle sister really shows us into the behind the scenes of a long term marriage and what happens when maybe the spark dims. And does that mean the relationship is doomed, or is this just a phase, or what does that mean? And I was actually thinking how interesting in fiction that you can take just your one life and slice it and make little pieces of the life in each character to explore so many things at once. It's almost like this magic

[19:07]Heather Aimee O'Neill: because we cut dissection, a lot. We're different people. We're not different people, but we're confronting different things at different points in our life. Panelists were talking earlier about how even sometimes when we don't want to change, life forces us to change. And that's good. It should. Otherwise, what's the point? So yeah, I definitely, the character of Alice, I really love her marriage to Kyle. It's not all romance, but it felt really very real to me. Even with the conflict that they're having, I wanted to allow for a lot of compassion for Kyle's perspective, even though that's maybe not a perspective that I have. I didn't want to render him as wrong. I didn't want there to The book deals with some pretty controversial topics, but I didn't want or expect for there to be a tidy moral takeaway. I wanted that nuance to exist within all of the relationships and characters.

[20:08]Zibby Owens: I feel like your oldest character really gives us a glimpse into sort of momlife. Yeah. And how do you deal with small children and not that small, but how do you deal with kids and the stress of that and on a plane what's in your phone and the kids and the whole thing. That was fun to write. Yeah, that

[20:28]Heather Aimee O'Neill: pulled a little bit from some of my own experience of traveling with young kids. Again, she was kind of a fun character to write because she doesn't really have a filter, yet it's almost like her lack of filter is its own wall. It's almost like, I'll say the thing so that you don't see what I'm not saying about me, about myself. And so it becomes a kind of protective layer.

[20:53]Zibby Owens: And then another sort of slice of the one person, you also have aging parents. How do you deal with that?

[21:01]Heather Aimee O'Neill: And talk a little about them. Well, think that one of the things that felt important to me about incorporating the aging parents was, for myself and so many people, I know that's a very real experience to have. I'm very close with my parents, and they're very independent. There's always turns, right? And there's always shifts and developments. And I knew for the sisters, at the beginning of the story, the sisters are very separate from each other. They're kind of in their own echo chamber of the story they're telling themselves. And that's very isolating. And by the end, I wanted them to find connection, not only because I felt like it was important for them as individuals, but also because things are going to happen. More things are going happen in the family. It doesn't just stop. When you have one tragedy or one experience, life continues to go on and life will continue to go on. So I felt like I wanted to kind of pepper in some concerns about what the next chapter of their lives are going to be, but will they be able to be there to support each other through it, Which is one of the blessings, I think, of having siblings. I love that. If you're lucky enough to have a close relationship.

[22:22]Zibby Owens: And I think it's a way also to have compassion for yourself, to see I these different sides of think it would be an interesting exercise for anyone to say, okay, this is one piece of me. This is the frantic mom piece. Let me write that character, and let me write the character who's dealing with loss, and let me write this character who has her mom aging or whatever, dad having an issue. Because if you see it in someone else, you're much more likely to say, oh my gosh, look what she's going through. And then you realize it's all what you're going through. Yeah. It would help It's so true. I can't tell you how

[22:56]Heather Aimee O'Neill: desperate I am for more compassion and empathy in the world. I was at my launch the other day, not somebody, my very good friend Leo, who was the person I was in conversation with, asked me, What do you think the job of an artist is right now? And obviously, everyone is going to have a different answer and should have a different answer. But for me, I really think it is to help us see each other's humanity, and to not just see each other's differences, but to see what are the points of connection and what are the ways that we are more alike than different. I mean, sounds cliche, but it's really lacking in the world right now. No, it's not cliche, it's actually true. Every

[23:43]Zibby Owens: relationship could use a I little dose of feel like everyone can use dose of that. You are a teacher, you help other people with their manuscripts, and yet this is your debut novel. You've written poetry. Talk about that, and how did you end up teaching before publishing, and why now for this book, and everything? So I

[24:05]Heather Aimee O'Neill: got my MFA in fiction, but I primarily wrote poetry and have two poetry collections. I started I also wrote short stories and essays, and I started teaching at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and then moved on to editing, working with writers one on one. And a couple of the writers I worked with went on to do very, very well. And then I started to be able to do that more. And I was telling Zivvy that I also It's hard to be a writer. You have to hustle. And I've done a lot of things. One of the hats I wore was a copywriter and copyeditor, and I got to work on some incredible projects, including one for her father for Schwarzman Scholars, which was so thrilling. I mean, was this enormous, beautiful book. By the way, on my coffee table. Amazing. Love it. So you had come over. Yeah. Oh my gosh, love I love it. So, yeah. So I wore lots of different hats. But over the past decade, I've shifted mostly to editing, you know, one on one editing. I, again, not to sound like a cliche, but even I've had such extraordinary teachers, but my students have definitely been my best teachers because the first novel I wrote was many years ago. And When I shared it with my mentor's agent, she was like, I really like the writing, but there's no plot here. There's no story. And I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I was like, Of course there's a story here. But then as I began to edit and to teach, you begin to see it more, and you're like, Oh, yes, when there's not a plot, when things are not like, you don't want to turn the page because they're a lot better when they have plots. Yeah, are. Who knew? They are. So it's something I wish I had learned earlier, but it was something that my students taught me. Amazing.

[25:57]Zibby Owens: I just wanted to read one more quote. This is about secrets again. I should have told you about her. This is Maggie and Isabelle talking. She said, I should have told you about her, she said, about everything, but I was ashamed and wanted to forget it ever happened. Isabelle leaned against the wooden bed frame and picked at the green polish on her nails. That's kind of your family's thing, isn't it? She said, pretend everything's okay even when it's not. Isn't that every family's thing? Maybe, but it's not my thing and it doesn't have to be yours.

[26:26]Heather Aimee O'Neill: I like that message. Yeah, I do too. Again, Isabelle was kind of my character to hold a mirror up. And so she was very useful to me, know, because I'm sure everyone here has had the experience of when you bring somebody new into a group or your family or a place, you suddenly see it through a different lens. And that's what happens with Mackie when she brings Isabelle into that space. She sees her family through this different lens, and it's enlightening. It reveals both the cracks, but also the beauty, and she can kind of hold it all. Do you have another project coming out at any point? I do. You I just sold my second book, which is called Winter Island, and it is about a high stakes surrogacy where three lives collide. And I'm really excited to write it. Amazing. Yeah. Congratulations. We're about halfway through it, but have

[27:22]Zibby Owens: to finish. Not sure about the title. Oh, yeah? I don't know. Okay.

[27:27]Heather Aimee O'Neill: Winter Island. Don't know. Winter Island. Well, it's on another island, but I didn't want to use the exact So

[27:34]Zibby Owens: Okay. Well, we'll see what happens with this. And if you have other ideas Okay. I'll read it. I'll let you know.

[27:40]Heather Aimee O'Neill: Thank you so much. Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Keep showing up for yourself. Keep showing up for yourself, because that's Then you give yourself a chance, and that's everything. Amazing. Congratulations

[27:52]Zibby Owens: on all your success on this beautiful book. Thank Can't wait to watch you in the world. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Pleasure. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.