Family and Forgiveness: Mary Beth Keane on Writing Whale Harbor

From the acclaimed author of Ask Again, Yes, this sweeping, dramatic family story about the bonds of brotherhood confronts immigration and identity from the shores of Ireland to the mountains of Montana. Read on for an exclusive essay from Mary Beth Keane on writing Whale Harbor.

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Whale Harbor is my fifth novel but it’s by far my most personal because it was inspired by my father’s life. In a nutshell, my father was from a rural, Irish-speaking village in the west of Ireland, called Ros Muc (which is in Connemara, for those familiar). There was almost no work there in the 1960s and he grew up knowing that when he was old enough he’d have to leave for England or America. He was the second oldest of eleven children and in the year 1963 when he was 19 and ready to emigrate to the US, his mother died very suddenly just a few weeks after giving birth to a baby boy.

As anyone might imagine, in addition to the shock and grief of losing a mother, her death also presented a practical problem. His father – my grandfather – was a postman and perhaps more notably, an alcoholic, and could not raise eleven children on his own. My father postponed his plans to emigrate for a while so he could help at home. It was an overwhelming task to figure out because there was not just the new baby but also a whole range of ages and needs. Eventually he realized the best way to help would be to leave for America and send money back once he found work there. When he was getting ready to go – the story has it – one of my uncles who was around eleven or twelve at the time begged my Dad to bring him along. He didn’t want to stay in their house, and he and my dad were very close. My father refused because he didn’t know how he’d support himself in New York, let alone a much younger brother. He promised to bring him to New York when he was established. A short time after my Dad left, that uncle, my dad’s younger brother, ran away.

The story of my grandmother’s sudden death and my uncle’s disappearance was around me all my life. I don’t remember “finding out” – I think I just always knew. All those motherless children, a problematic father left behind – it was all very rich material for a kid with a vivid imagination, and I think I’ve been filling in the blank spaces for myself ever since I first heard it. It all sharpened for me in 2022 when my father was dying. He’d been ill for a very long time and in his last weeks he reverted to only speaking his first language, which was Irish, and which my sisters and I don’t understand. When my uncles came over they translated for us and said he was still fixated on why he didn’t bring his brother with him when he emigrated. If he had, my dad reasoned fifty years later, he never would have run away. They would have been okay in New York. It would have been difficult but they would have made it. He felt terrible guilt about it, and that shocked me. He was such a good father, and I hated to think of him so troubled at the moment in his life when he should be finding peace.

After he died, I started writing bits and pieces as I imagined that time for him, really just as a way to work through my own grief in losing him. Eventually it started feeling like a larger project about family and forgiveness and I knew I was working on my next novel.