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| Heather Aimee O'Neill (photo: Daniel D'Ottavio) |
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Heather Aimee O'Neill is a poet, a teacher, and the assistant director of the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife and two sons. The Irish Goodbye (Holt, September 30) is her first novel.
Do you remember why and when you knew you wanted to be a writer?
I honestly don't remember ever wanting to be anything but a writer. It feels like it was always a part of me. I struggled to learn how to read as a kid, most likely due to undiagnosed dyslexia, and my parents had to pull me out of Catholic school and put me in public school so I could get the support I needed. It was a miserable experience, but despite that, I loved being read to and always remember existing in a world of story--creating elaborate narratives with my Barbie dolls and acting out adventures in the woods around my house with the kids I grew up with. My grandmother was an English teacher and an artist and she really encouraged me to express myself despite my struggle to read. In sixth grade, I won a Walt Whitman poetry contest on Long Island, and I was hooked. In high school, I would spend my time in math and science classes looking for cool metaphors in the material I was supposed to be learning. For many years, I just focused on poetry. Poetry allowed me to abstract truths--fiction felt more vulnerable somehow. But eventually, I was ready to move in that direction.
You wear a few different hats--you're a poet, an editor, and a writing coach. In what ways could you see or feel those parts of your brain affecting The Irish Goodbye as you wrote it? Or, put another way, how did those identities intersect as you wrote your own debut novel?
Yes, every day I feel so lucky to wear these different hats. As a writer, editor, and teacher, I get to spend my time thinking and talking about people's stories, their characters, their worlds. I'm obsessed with it--I really can't imagine doing anything else. After graduate school, I supported myself with long-form copywriting (annual reports pay better than an adjunct salary and poetry!) but I eventually moved into editing fiction and memoir. All of these experiences taught me the importance of getting to the point--of not wasting your reader's time with superfluous detail. In graduate school I had a wonderful poetry teacher, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, who would always ask us: "But what is it you're actually trying to say? In simple terms, what do you mean?" It's such a basic question, but it completely changed the way I think about writing. I really had to learn that--and it was liberating. The other thing I've learned from being an editor and teacher is that writing takes a long time. Not just finishing a project but coming into being as a writer. It's not just about craft and finding your voice--it's also about having the courage to tell the story you want to tell and giving yourself the space, time, and grace to try. Without a doubt, working with so many writers over the years helped give me that perspective.
Family is the heart of this novel, including how an individual affects the family unit. How do you think about family, more broadly? And what in particular did you want to capture about the nature of family or family relationships?
Family is one of my favorite topics to read and write about. I feel incredibly lucky to come from a large, tight-knit family. But the family I've created as an adult is large and close too--my ex-wife and I divorced when our sons were young, and I married my current wife a few years later. We're also close with the boys' biological father and his husband. We're all very much a family, and I'm so grateful for it. At the same time, I'm friends with many people who are estranged from their families for very real reasons--untreated mental health, rejection for being gay, generational trauma. In the book, I wanted to explore both the power of family as a place to return to and heal, and also what can tear a family apart. But I knew I wanted this to be a story about hope, forgiveness, reconnection, and love. That's what family means to me.
We can't talk about this book without talking about the thread of tragedy running through it. There's the accident, but there's also everything that came after--from the lawsuit and associated bankruptcy and resentment to Topher's suicide. Can you speak on the reason(s) you centered your book around a tragedy of this nature?
Though this book is not about my family, we did experience the tragedy of 9/11 on a deeply personal level. My father's company lost half its employees, including many of my and my sisters' friends--young people who'd gone to work with him after college--and my cousin, Peter. This experience shook my family to its core. We spent years grieving, and in ways, still are. Though the impact of this experience didn't mirror the tragedy the Ryan family faces, spending so much time with people in grief--family, friends, community--shaped me. I wanted to explore the ripple effects of a tragedy on a group of people, and how it changes them in ways they're not fully conscious of. Grief is insidious, but healing can also move slowly in quiet ways that bring grace and transformation.
You alternate between the sisters' points of view, and while we get glimpses of the parents through them, you didn't include the parents' POV. Why did you decide to keep the viewpoint centralized, rather than telling a holistic picture from every family member's POV?
I actually did include Nora's point of view at the beginning, but I stopped early on as I began to see that this was more a story about sisterhood--about the next generation. I read once that the longest relationship most people have in their lives is with their siblings--they've known you from the beginning. When Topher dies, his parents lose a child--and maybe that was just too painful for me to explore--but for the sisters, it's also a seismic shift in their identities as siblings. Their brother--who caused so much chaos and stress, but whom they loved--is gone and now it's just them. Each sister carries some degree of shame or confusion around his death. I wanted to focus on what that meant for them not just individually but as a unit.
The setting feels like a presence in the novel (maybe even another member of the family). What drew you to the location of the novel? What appeals to you about having or creating such a strong sense of place?
I grew up in a house on the water and that experience is rooted in my sense of home. I'm a bit like Cait in that respect--my parents' house still feels like home to me. Even though I've lived in cities and apartments my whole adult life, the smells, sounds, and textures of the beach are part of what "home" means to me. I also loved the idea of a particular house holding history for the family. It represents so much--the place that raised them, where Topher took his life, and the place they're drawn back to. It's a place that almost demands their return, and ultimately, their reconnection.
What books about family do you love, or think about often?
So many! Anna Karenina is one of my favorite novels about the comforts, constraints, expectations, love, and struggles of family. Other favorites include (of course) Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Ann Patchett's Commonwealth, Mary Beth Keane's Ask Again, Yes, Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and Claire Keegan's Foster. I also love books about found family, like Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, and Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. To me, families are endlessly fascinating. --Kristen Coates