After Visiting Friends explores a most terrifying idea: What if all the people around you are just waiting for someone – YOU – to tell the truth?  It’s not easy to accept your fate – that you were meant to live longer than your dad, that he had secrets and that you are the only person that wants to know what really happened. How many times can you ask yourself why me, before you go ahead and write the story you need to tell?

The author, Michael Hainey, has a nagging question that he carried around with him for nearly thirty years. While looking through various obituaries published after his father’s death, he found a few incongruities.  The Sun Times, where Robert Hainey worked as an assistant copy desk chief, made no mention of the place or cause of death.  Chicago Today, though, where Robert’s brother worked, gave a street address where the man had “collapsed and died,” after leaving the home of a friend.  Finally, the Chicago Daily writes that he died, while visiting friends, on the North Side.

At age 18 he asks himself: Friends?  Who are these friends? And why have i never met them? Continue reading →