O'Neill, Heather

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, and radio broadcaster. Frequent contributor to This American Life, Public Radio International (PRI).

WRITINGS:

Betrayal, Minerva (London, England), 1995.

Two Eyes Are You Sleeping, DC Books (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), 1998.

Lullabies for Little Criminals (novel), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Radio broadcaster and novelist Heather O'Neill is a regular contributor to This American Life, the public radio social and cultural commentary program. In her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, O'Neill "infuses her troubling story with a kind of heartbreaking innocence," wrote Michael Cart in Booklist, as she recounts the life of Baby, a twelve-year-old girl struggling to survive in the more squalid regions of Montreal. In Baby's difficult world, her father, Jules, who is only twenty-seven, is a heroin addict, and her mother is dead. They live in utter poverty, and Baby is often drawn into her father's unsuccessful attempts to make money. Still, her love for her father is so strong that their dire circumstances are often made to feel more like an adventure than a dismal, grinding existence. When Jules goes into rehab, Baby is shuffled through the bleak foster-care system, where she becomes a cogent observer of the ups and downs of people and events around her. Her life continues its downward spiral when her boyfriend becomes a pimp and, at age thirteen, she descends into prostitution and heroin addiction. She always clings to the hope, however, that she will be successfully reunited with her father and that they will forge a family life together. After enduring several miserable months, Baby and Jules are finally brought together again, though neither is sure that they'll be able to overcome their considerable disadvantages in order to escape the pull of the only type of life they've ever known. "Baby is the real triumph here; Jules's charm is utterly believable, but Baby's yearning for him, even for his cruelties, aches to the bone," observed a Kirkus Reviews critic. "Baby's precocious introspection … feels pitch perfect, and the book's final pages are tear-jerkingly effective," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer.