Big family dramas find fuel in big secrets. In Heather Aimee O’Neill’s debut, The Irish Goodbye, the big secrets of the past haunt the present, even as the suburban, Long Island Ryan family piece together their future. They are haunted by tragedy, Catholicism, and the many minor scandals they’ve created along the way.
The novel’s central tension is built around long-standing conflict between two families and the mystery surrounding the deaths of a brother from each. The novel unfolds over Thanksgiving weekend, years later, when the children are adults. Each has secrets of their own that they wish to keep sequestered from their judgmental family, all while struggling with caring for their elderly parents.
The book opens in August of 1990, the defining moment in the lives of the Ryan family. In the final days of summer, Daniel Larkin dies in a boating accident. Daniel is the younger brother of Luke, who happens to be best friends with Topher Ryan, the oldest and only boy in the Ryan family. Topher is arrested in connection with the death—it was his boat after all. The scene unfolds from the perspective of Maggie, who was otherwise engaged in the Port Haven Beach Club sandcastle competition.
The narrative jumps forward several years to a moment when the Ryan sisters are returning to Long Island for Thanksgiving. Maggie is driving down from Massachusetts with her newish girlfriend, a woman she recently cheated on with an ex-hookup. Cait, living in England with her two children, has just quit her job after being passed over for a promotion, and has been canoodling with Luke Larkin, who also happens to be returning to Long Island for the long weekend. And finally Alice, who lives nearby with her husband and children, suddenly finds herself accidentally pregnant just as she was beginning to restart her career.
Daniel’s death sparks the central conflict woven throughout the novel. It’s a persistent mystery fueling tension and conflict between the characters. The Ryan family, for instance, dislikes Luke since his parents sued the family over Daniel’s death. As a device, O’Neill has skillfully withheld information from readers, parsing out details slowly over time that ultimately justify the characters’ emotions. It’s a particularly tricky technique since the characters actually all know the details, and only the reader has been kept in the dark.
The absence of Topher is another mystery integrated into the plot. Eventually, we learn too that Topher, who bears the burden of Daniel’s death, took his own life. This reveal is a kind of teaser injected midway through the book as a reward, an acknowledgment that as readers, we’re curious about these deaths, and a promise that all will eventually be revealed. By the time we learn how Topher died, it’s well overdue, actually. These dead characters are a big part of the motivations of the living.
Every character in The Irish Goodbye is impacted by Daniel’s death. But there are plenty of other secrets to go around, and the choice to tease out tidbits of the details of the deaths creates an artificial tension between the narrative and the reader. There are more interesting conflicts in the present secrets. Each of the sisters is engulfed in their own crisis, and even their aging parents are hiding secrets about their health, age, and ability to maintain the house.
From a craft perspective, it’s easy to see why the information about Daniel’s death and Tropher’s suicide is kept from us. There is natural tension there. But that also makes it a distraction from the other contemporary secrets, which play out quickly and are shallower as a result.
The timeline of the novel is compact, playing out over the Thanksgiving weekend with the occasional flashback. Whenever we need a piece of information about the past, the narrative voice quickly eases into a flashback. But the succinct timeline also means some of the subplots wrap up a little too quickly, like with Alice’s pregnancy. She only just learns she’s pregnant at the start of the holiday. The Ryans are devoutly Catholic. They’ve even invited Father Kelly to Thanksgiving dinner. The resulting question of whether Alice should abort the fetus causes some fuss with her husband, Kyle, and she’s afraid of her mother, Nora, discovering the pregnancy. Despite these concerns, this secret and subplot somehow resolve during the long weekend, even with the high emotional cost of the decision.
The deaths in the past overshadow the present, detracting from, rather than adding to, the immediacy of their problems. That means the substance of the sister’s secrets isn’t all that important. Ultimately, their minor secrets in the present aren’t really the point. The drama, for the reader, is in how the plots untwist themselves in the final climax
O’Neill’s strengths is understanding how to build suspense by keeping secrets, both among the characters, and from the reader. There are many different parts of the story that unwind as a spectacle around the catered Thanksgiving dinner with Father Kelly as witness. The fact that the resolutions sometimes feel emotionally superficial, particularly the quick wrap-up of Alice and Kyle’s disagreement about her pregnancy, is less important than watching those secrets revealed. There’s a beautiful chaos to the Thanksgiving climax, and that is the payoff, and the reason to read through it.
However, despite the simplification of some of these emotional struggles, the trade-off is an easy-to-read, fast-paced novel that’s easy to indulge in. The minor dramas of all the little secrets create many moments of anticipation, high-stakes risks, and uncertainty over who will find out what, all of which makes for an easily digested story. There’s momentum to reading O’Neill’s narrative and, in the end, satisfying consequences.
The Irish Goodbye joins a longstanding tradition of messy, Irish American family dramas, filled with Catholic guilt, sibling rivalry, and flawed families that feel like our own. It’s the kind of novel where a holiday screen adaptation feels inevitable, a comfortable, easy read for those moments when you’re hiding from your own messy family on a long holiday weekend.
FICTION
The Irish Goodbye
By Heather Aimee O’Neill
Henry Holt and Co.
Published September 30, 2025
