Aoibheann Sweeney
Sweeney was raised in Massachusetts and attended Harvard University and the University of Virginia’s MFA Program, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow.
Her first novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, is about a girl who grows up alone with her father on an island in Maine and is sent to stay in New York City with friends of her father's who open up her past, and her own world, in ways she cannot begin to imagine. It was published by Penguin Press in 2007 and was an Editor’s Choice at the New York Times Book Review and the recipient of a 2007 Lambda Literary Award.
“Among other things, I've taken up smoking. Ana says I should stop with the good girl/bad girl stuff, and obviously she's right, but sometimes when I have a cigarette in my hand and the streets are dangerously empty and I've had a few drinks after my shift and I am noticing the lights that are on in different apartments, lighting stairways and whole buildings, blinking red on the skyline, I think about the nights on the island when I was content to stand alone outside the house, listening to the god horns in that soft blackness, and tasting the air, sweet with salt.”
Aoibheann Sweeney
“The whole world seemed full of hurt feelings and apologies, endless selfishness and explanations. Wasn't there anything that anyone could understand about each other? Weren't there some hurt feelings that mattered more? Or did it all matter just as much, interminably, wound after wound?”
Aoibheann Sweeney
“It is astonishing, in the end, how difficult it is to know the things you know. What I mean is that all I had discovered was everything I knew all along.”
Aoibheann Sweeney