The October Read With Jenna book club pick is a perfect fall read "about a family filled with secrets," Jenna Bush Hager says.
"The Irish Goodbye" by Heather Aimee O'Neill is Jenna's October 2025 pick, and follows three sisters as they return home for Thanksgiving, where they have to confront the effects of an accident that haunts their youth — and their adult lives.
"They return for a Thanksgiving weekend to all be under one roof, and just as families know better than anybody, old patterns come out," Jenna says. "We find out about a tragedy that has left these sisters reeling, but it also is full of love and hope and humor."
Jenna says readers who loved her September 2024 pick, "Blue Sisters" by Coco Mellors, will also love "The Irish Goodbye."
O'Neill tells TODAY.com her debut novel starts with three sisters: Cait, Alice and Maggie, who are returning to their childhood home on Long Island "years after their brother's death has fractured — really shattered — the family."
"In the process there, these long, buried secrets emerge, and these simmering resentments come to a boil," O'Neill says. "It forces the sisters to confront their past and have to reckon with a lot of mistakes and ask for forgiveness, and even offer forgiveness themselves."
O'Neill has published poetry collections, and says she wanted to write her first novel about a family and a community in grief.
She says she originally started writing a story about Sept. 11, but it "felt too close to home," as she lost friends and family members in the 2001 terrorist attacks.
"It began to shift, and incorporated these other tragedies into the book, but it was still a way for me to to write about grief," she says. "I knew I wanted to write about sisters and the impact that it had on this unit of sisters."
O'Neill says she started writing the story set during a weekend in the summer, and then switched it to being a holiday.
"I wanted it to be kind of weird," she says. "I wanted for there to be the beach element and the summer element, but also the Thanksgiving element, but for something to just feel a little off, so I kept the snowstorm in it."
"Also, it can feel challenging to write a story that just has one primary setting," she adds. "So when you give it other challenges, it gives you more opportunities to have ... more atmospheric detail, which can play a role in it."
O'Neill says she set out to intentionally include "culturally charged topics" in the book.
"I really, really wanted to do so in a way that allowed for nuance and wasn't moralizing," she says.
"My agenda really was about how do we have more empathy for each other," she adds. "I think I'm not alone in feeling really tired by how divisive things have become and the toxicity, and how that's showing up in families and relationships. So there was intentionality there."
After reading the book, O'Neill says she hopes readers will ask themselves, "Who am I not speaking to, or who do I feel disconnected from? And is there a way to repair the relationship?"
"I do not think there's always a way. I do think that some estrangements are necessary and healthy," she says. "The other thing would be, 'How can I choose compassion more for other people and for myself? Or the self I used to be, the mistakes I made in the past, and for other people as well?'"
O'Neill, who has two older sisters in real life, says her family has read the book — though their reactions weren't what she was expecting.
"I also grew up in an Irish Catholic family on the water, but when my family found out what the story was about, my sisters were really nervous. I was like, 'Trust me, it's not about us,'" she recalls.
When she gave her sisters early copies of the book, she said one of her sisters called her and questioned why the characters were doing things they never did as a family in real life.
"At first they were worried that it was going to be about them, and then they were like, disappointed that it wasn't about them," she says through laughter.
O'Neill, who is a mother of two, says getting the call that she was picked to be the October Read With Jenna pick "was utterly unbelievable."
"I don't know if I've ever been so pleasantly surprised by anything in my life," she says. "I just like, screamed."
She said her oldest son came running downstairs to see if she was alright, and she told him she got exciting news, but that she couldn't tell him what it was yet.
O'Neill then reflected on struggling to learn how to read as a child to now being a published author.
"There is this part of me that looks back on that kid who had to leave Catholic school in fourth grade because they couldn't learn how to read," she says. "Having this opportunity, it just feels like none other."
