Authors Interviewing Characters: Sally Hanan

My Heart Went Walking by Sally Hanan (Fire Drinkers Publishing, hardback £20, paperback £11.99) is an Irish tale of love, loss and redemption.

Sally Hanan’s sublime debut mixes the prose of Sue Monk Kidd with the dialogue of Maeve Binchy. With captivating warmth, she pulls us in to explore how it felt to live in Ireland’s changing culture of the 1980s, and how it often made a woman’s decisions for her.

Kept apart by their love for one man, two sisters embark on their own paths towards survival, love, and understanding, until they finally meet again in the worst of circumstances.

My Heart Went Walking is a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that sweeps from the small Irish town of Donegal to the ‘big smoke’ of Dublin City; a book that celebrates the pull of family and the chance of redemption. It is a novel for anyone who feels connected to the Irish approach to life—that of grit and laughter—and also for everyone who loves an overriding message of hope and restoration in all things.

Author Sally Hanan interviews Una Gallagher, the protagonist of her debut women’s fiction novel, My Heart Went Walking.

It’s Christmas, and I don’t have to wait at all at the front door of Bewley’s for eighteen-year-old Una to show up. It’s pissing rain, as usual, in the big smoke (Dublin), so we pull our hoods a little bit farther over our hair so it won’t go crazier than our ‘80s hairstyles have already made it and practically run in to the warmth.

Bewley’s is playing Wham and Band Aid, like most of the shops along Grafton St. They have to cater to all these old grannies and Christmas shoppers and children with their fingers up their noses. 

Una gets sausages and bread and butter, and just seeing them on her plate makes me want to make my own roll-up as well, so I join her but add a good dollop of baked beans to mine. The air is a bit thick with the mammies in one corner tapping their cigarettes into the ashtrays, so we sit as far away from them as we can, even though we’re smokers too. It’s the ‘80s, and we have an obligation to look cool.

“Una, thanks so much for meeting me. As you know, this interview is very last minute, but your lovely boyf…”

Una reaches a hand out and puts it on mine as I pull my pen out of my handbag. “Let me stop you right there. Robbie’s not my boyfriend.”

“Oh,” I say. “But he said…”

“Oh, I can imagine what Robbie said, but no; I love another man and he knows it, but he’s spreading the charm in the hopes it’ll eventually rub its way in.” She laughs and rearranges her permed hair, twisting the front section of it before setting the hairband over it.

“Ah yes, Cullen. But I hear things haven’t gone so well there, even though you were best friends since junior infants. You ran away from home when you were seventeen and didn’t tell him or your family why?”

Una’s eyes fill up a little, and she spends a lot of energy spreading her butter into each corner of her piece of sliced pan. “Yes,” is all she says.

I try again. “Robbie said you went home to Donegal to see if you could make up with Cullen and your family, but that as soon as you got there, something terrible happened and you had to come back to Dublin.”

“Way to keep a secret, Robbie,” she mutters before biting into her food. She wipes a bit of the exploding juice off her chin with the back of her hand at the same time as closing her eyes in ecstasy. She doesn’t talk again until her mouth is empty. “It’s okay. I somehow managed to get a job and some lovely people to live with. They’re like second grandparents to… um.” She shifts on her chair.

“That’s not something you want to talk about?”

She drums her fingers on the table before looking at me. “No. But thank you for asking.”

“So Robbie is available then? You wouldn’t mind me…?”

Una’s blue-eyelinered eyes get very wide, but she shakes head slowly. “He’s all yours.” Then she focuses very deliberately on her food again. “Robbie said you were going to interview me about the differences between working in Donegal to working in Dublin. I didn’t know this would be so personal.”

I stop writing. “Sorry about that. It’s just that when you study law and write for the college paper, you try to get the human side of the story rather than just the facts.”

She nods but offers nothing further that’s private.

We talk about the leather shop she works in, the machines and tools she uses, and the workshops she does for schoolchildren. I ask her if she has anything else she’d like to say before we finish up.

“Just that—” she pulls her scarf off the back of her chair, “—just that when you decide to run away from home, it can be for a lot of reasons that no one but you understands, and when you look back at those days of decision, things might make more sense but you’re still glad you did it, you know?” She lifts her leather gloves off the table. “I’d just like you to say something about that because I don’t want any other young girls to read this and think running away is easy. You leave everything behind—love, hopes, dreams, friends, sisters.” She blinks hard and sniffs. “Even though things worked out for me, touch wood, leaving home is like clearing everything out of every drawer and every wall of your bedroom and shoving it in the bin, and you have to decide who the new you is in the empty space.”

She looks like someone who is still figuring that out. I write down her words and then push my notebook back in my bag. “Thanks so much, Una. You’re a star. And I wish you all the best in this new life of yours. It sounds hard.”

She nods but smiles. “You tell that Robbie I’m going to break his balls over this,” and she walks out ahead of me into the puddles of Ireland.

My Heart Went Walking by Sally Hanan (Fire Drinkers Publishing, hardback $30, paperback $17.99, eBook $9.99, audiobook $24.95) is available from all good book retailers https://amzn.to/30O3SxE

Sally Hanan grew up in Ireland and became a nurse, but she left all the big family dinners, rain, and cups of tea when she and her husband moved to Texas. Her family now raised, she works as a book editor and occasional lay counselor and life coach.  She won a 2021 Readers’ Favorite gold medal winner for her nonfiction. www.sallyhanan.com

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers