Goodreads asked Billy O'Callaghan:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Billy O'Callaghan 'The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind' is a collection of short stories, so the ideas came to me over a period of about four or five years. Mainly, they emerged from issues in my own life. My ambition was to present real-world problems - illness, death, abandonment, the crumbling of relationships - in as truthful and realistic a way as possible. I wanted to paint portraits of people struggling with life and circumstance, dealing with such emotions as guilt, sorrow and regret. Ultimately, the stories are about the enduring quality of the human heart.
Most of the stories in the collection were written in an attempt to better understand and clarify my thoughts on given subjects, all of which affected me, either directly or indirectly, over the past decade or so. The settings for the stories were drawn from places I'd seen and come to know, and the plots and characters emerged naturally from the themes that, during those years, had largely dominated my mind.

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