56 pages • 1 hour read
We Are the Brennans
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Themes
The Importance of Family Unity
The novel explores the Brennan family’s relationships and shows they are the strongest, most content, and most prosperous together. At the novel's beginning, the divided Brennans are steeped in secrets, problems, and complications. Sunday’s loneliness causes her to drink too much and get into an accident. Denny’s disconnect from his family causes Theresa to separate from him, Jackie has difficulty rebuilding his life after his arrest, Mickey misses his daughter and the stability she provided, and Shane struggles with anxiety. Sunday’s secret overwhelms her in the beginning. However, when rebuilding her relationship with her family, she regains her joy and gains newfound confidence and assertiveness. When she pulls a gun on Billy, she tells him, “Get out and don’t ever come back. You fuck with one Brennan, you fuck with six Brennans” (190). Embracing her identity as a Brennan gives her the courage to scare Billy and remind him that he will pay for his actions. At his siblings’ insistence, Denny starts communicating with Theresa, and she and their daughter, Molly, move back into the house. Jackie starts working and painting again, and Mickey and Shane regain peace of mind with their family reunited.
Kale’s role within the Brennan family is another major element of the novel that exemplifies this theme. Mickey counts him as one of them early on:
Kale was practically a Brennan anyway. He’d grown up four blocks away and spent the bulk of his time in their home. Mickey had never minded. What was another kid, especially one who was so unassuming, when there were already four (34).
This makes Kale reluctant to distance himself from them, much to Vivienne’s dismay. When Sunday threatens Billy at Brennan’s, she includes Kale as a sixth Brennan without thinking about it, showing that she sees him as a family member. In Chapter 16, Kale dreads the idea of moving to Manor Hills when “the very thing [Vivienne] wanted distance from—the Brennans—was the very thing he needed to make it through this marriage at times” (219). In Chapter 17, Jackie calls the Brennans Kale’s “adopted family” (232). At the novel’s end, Kale realizes that he belongs with the Brennans because they are, and always have been, his true family. Though he holds onto his commitment as Luke’s father, he cannot separate himself from the Brennans because he is one of them.
At the end of the novel, Kale and the Brennans are united at the kitchen table, where they have connected as a family for years. When Jackie finds their father’s gun in his room and realizes that their father killed Billy Walsh as revenge for hurting Sunday and Denny, they decide to work together to solve that problem: “They all screwed up, made mistakes, and hurt one another. But in the end they came together” (271). United in their devotion, they know they can confront their father’s decision and whatever aftermath it might bring when the time comes.
The Negative Impact of Secrets and Lies
Throughout the novel, the secrets and lies plaguing the Brennan family threaten to tear them apart. This is especially true for Sunday and Denny, who both need to tell the truth in order to heal. They also turn Billy Walsh against the Brennans and lead him to hurt both Sunday and Denny. The Brennans’ secrets and lies go back to Mickey and Maura Brennan’s younger years in Ireland and devastate the family before their children were born. Mickey had once worked for the IRA and had to leave for the United States after having “the Orangemen after him for revenge and the IRA out to own him” (36). He never told his children, however. He and his sister Clare had also kept her out-of-wedlock pregnancy with Grail a secret, telling her and the Brennan children that “Grail’s father died in Ireland before she was born” (36). Though these secrets do not cause repercussions for the Brennans, they establish a pattern of smoothing over uncomfortable truths with lies rather than being honest. The children internalize this pattern and unconsciously apply it in their own lives, leading to the difficulties they face.
However, Mickey’s secret affair with Lynn Walsh brings devastation to his family long after the affair’s end. Mickey’s affair breaks Maura’s trust and brings her a pervading sense of shame that haunts Maura until her death. The affair is also discovered by Billy, who becomes enraged and tries to get revenge years later by sexually assaulting Sunday. Billy’s anger at Mickey and Lynn’s affair also leads him to try to sabotage Brennan’s by damaging the new restaurant and loaning Denny money. Denny’s financial troubles caused by Billy’s tampering lead him to keep his finances a secret from his family, endangering his marriage to Theresa and causing tension between him and his siblings. Only when he tells his siblings, his father, and Theresa about his debt can they help him save Brennan’s and his marriage.
Maura’s shame over Mickey’s affair and her fear of scandal lead her to keep his affair a secret from their children. They also cause her to intensify Sunday’s shame and guilt about her encounter with Billy and her miscarriage by chastising her for not knowing she was pregnant and “going up to a strange man’s room” (250). She tells Sunday to keep the events secret for fear that Mickey and the Brennan boys would go after Billy. She also tells Sunday that if people discovered she drank while pregnant, “[i]t would be a stain on the soul of the whole family” (251). Maura’s reaction convinces Sunday to keep her attack a secret and causes extreme loneliness and guilt. Her loneliness and refusal to confront her family lead to her accident and force her brother and her family back into her life. Once she tells Denny and Kale her secret, she begins to heal: “[S]he felt more awake, like she was shaking off a five-year winter of hibernation” and that the following day, “she’d woken up with a strong desire to do something, take some kind of action” (181). With her secret out, Sunday feels like she can move on and begins making plans instead of living in the past. She also allows herself to be in love with Kale again without worrying that he will judge her for what happened. As the Brennans start letting go of their secrets and become more honest with each other, they give themselves and each other a chance to heal and improve their lives.
Redemption and Forgiveness as a Path to Healing
Redemption and forgiveness are essential in helping the Brennans resolve their internal and interpersonal conflicts. Mickey Brennan spends the novel seeking redemption for his infidelity and the harm it has caused to his children. Early in the novel, he wonders if his memory loss is “a reckoning for past sins” and sees it as a “fitting punishment for a man who’d long kept secrets from his own family” (35). When he learns from Denny that Billy Walsh hurt Sunday and that she left because of that, he responds with an expression of “dreadful understanding” and looks “far older than he’d ever seemed before” (205). At that moment, he realizes what his affair with Billy’s mother had cost his family. He soon notices that Sunday, Jackie, and Kale also know about the affair, and later, Mickey concludes that “Billy was responsible for hurting his family and it was Mickey’s own fault” (241). Thus, he decides to do his best to “lift some of their burden now” (241) and keep Sunday in New York. He also prays to God “for His understanding, and asked to be forgiven his grievous trespasses” (242). At the novel’s end, he comes home satisfied to know his family is whole again and that Billy Walsh can no longer hurt them. Even though he has broken the law, in his mind, he has redeemed himself as a father.
The Brennans struggle to forgive each other. Kale begins the novel angry at Sunday because she “walked away” (85) from their relationship. He then becomes angry with Jackie for letting Sunday leave and at Maura when he learns that she told Sunday the attack was her fault. Denny also feels anger about their mother’s response to Sunday, saying, “[S]he had no right” (164). He later becomes angry at his father when he learns about the affair, asking questions in his mind such as, “How could you betray Mom like that, betray all of us? Do you realize what you opened us up to? Did Mom know what you were doing?” (202). Jackie is angry at his mother for shaming Sunday and recognizes that his father “deserved just as much blame, if not more” but decides that he is “tired of blaming people, including himself” (226).
Sunday blames herself for the sexual assault, taking her mother’s words to heart. However, after she tells Denny and Kale, she works to forgive herself, knowing that Denny and Kale still love and support her. She also eventually forgives her mother when she considers her mother’s point of view following the affair. At the novel’s end, when the Brennans realize that Mickey killed Billy Walsh, Denny and the other Brennans decide to forgive both their parents, and Denny notes, “Making some kind of peace with it all caused an uplifting in his chest” (271). By acknowledging that their parents were human and did everything they could to raise them right and give them a good life despite their flaws, they begin healing from the generational pain their parents’ actions had caused.
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