Date Published: December 10, 2024 (Paperback) / March 11, 2025 (Audiobook)
Publisher: She Writes Press/Tantor Media
Narrator: Aoife McMahon
Run Time: 9 hours and 39 minutes
Thirteen-year-old Mary Agnes Coyne, forced from her home in rural Ireland in 1886 after being accused of incest, endures a treacherous voyage across the Atlantic alone to an unknown life in America. From the tenements of New York to the rough alleys of Chicago, Mary Agnes suffers the bitter taste of prejudice for the crime of being poor and Irish.
After moving west to Colorado, Mary Agnes again faces hardships and grapples with heritage, religion, and matters of the heart. Will she ever find a home to call her own? Where?
Interview with Ashley E. Sweeney
The Irish Girl
What is your favorite part of the book?
The ending, of course! But don’t read the ending first, it would spoil the rest of the book.
I loved researching for The Irish Girl as it is based on the story of my great-grandmother Mary Agnes Coyne who came alone from Ireland to America in 1886. Standing on the ground where she grew up in rural Western Ireland was nothing short of a sacred experience, and a favorite part of researching the novel.
This is how I described the scene at the end of Dawros Beg, a small peninsula jutting into the Atlantic northwest of Galway where Mary Agnes spent her first thirteen years:
The sky, a brew of grey and slate and coal, shoulders heavy clouds that loom low over the landscape, obscuring the Twelve Bens beyond. Wind howls down the peninsula’s lane and carries with it the breath of the Atlantic. Rain beats against thatched-roof cottages and age-old stone walls. On rocky knolls, wild thyme, whitethorn, thrift, and stonecrop bloom early after winter, their delicate flowers clinging to life. The sea roars and churns, whitecaps as far as the horizon, out past the outer islands, even, thrusting salt spray in wild lacy bursts up jagged cliffs. Seabirds are no match for the wind today.
Does your book have a lesson? Moral?
The Irish Girl is at heart a love letter to my great-grandmother and her eldest daughter, Grace, my paternal grandmother. As with all my novels, I tell the story straight, underbelly and all, so you might say resilience is the key concept of my novels. I will explain that in detail later in the interview.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
Each of my protagonists, with the exception of Mary Agnes Coyne of The Irish Girl, is completely fictional, although I do set all my novels in particular times and places of history so many characters portrayed in the novels are historical.
This is especially true in Answer Creek, which chronicles the Donner Party as they traverse the continent in 1846-47 in search of a better life. Every character in the Donner Party portrayed in the novel is historic. As you might imagine, being true to 88 different characters took a lot of time and effort. The research alone took two years before two more years of writing.
In my other novels, most of the characters are fictional, and I get to know them for months before committing their stories to the page. This includes doing character studies, character boards, and character questions, as if I’m interviewing them, to get to know them through and through. As you might imagine, all my characters are very real to me, and I hope that translates to readers as well.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
I would have to say Eliza Waite, the protagonist of my first novel of the same name. Eliza reinvents herself, much as I was doing in my own life as I wrote her story. But I have a soft spot in my heart for all my protagonists. Just like I have four children, none of them is my “favorite,” although some qualities of each of them render them my favorite at different times.
The same is true with my protagonists. I love Ada Weeks of Answer Creek for her honesty and fortitude. After writing her story, I know I could not have survived what she experienced as a member of the Donner Party. In Hardland, I love Ruby Fortune for her drive to protect her sons at all costs. As for Mary Agnes, I love her optimism in the face of unthinkable hardship as a young teen. I mean, what were you doing at 13? I was wondering about boys and sports and grades and recitals, not forced from my home alone to face an uncertain future. I have such admiration for her.
What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?
Mr. French, another boarder at the Colorado Springs Inn, who takes advantage of Mary Agnes when she is vulnerable. I have known too many men, personally and professionally, who are classic narcissists. I have no bandwidth for narcissists and morphed several people I’ve known into Mr. French’s character (very satistfying!) Like Anne Lamott says, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
Ordinarily, this question would take days to answer, but because the protagonist of The Irish Girl is my great-grandmother, I can say without a doubt that she’d be tickled that I took the time to tell her story. And I hope to think she’d be proud of me, not only for being a novelist, but also for being a mother, grandmother, friend, artist, and activist.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
The connection between all my novels is threaded through resilience. All four protagonists, Eliza Waite (Eliza Waite), Ada Weeks (Answer Creek), Ruby Fortune (Hardland), and Mary Agnes Coyne (The Irish Girl) suffer hardship, poverty, misogyny, and heartache, and all four protagonists rise above their particular circumstances to succeed. That doesn’t guarantee a happy ending each time, but readers agree the endings are appropriate to each book (although there is rabid discussion on this topic over the ending of Answer Creek!)
All of the novels are stand-alone novels, and I don’t intend to write a sequel (or prequel) to any of them at this time. I have too many ideas swirling in my head for new novels!
A native New Yorker, Ashley E. Sweeney is the multi-award-winning author of four novels, The Irish Girl, Hardland, Answer Creek: A Novel of The Donner Party, and Eliza Waite. She graduated from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. with a degree in American Literature and American History and spent her career as a journalist and educator before turning to writing full-time. When she is not chained to her writing desk, Sweeney is an avid gardener, art quilter, and mosaic artist. She lives in the Pacific Northwest and Tucson.
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