Throughout Long Island, the pressures of operating in a small community impact each of the three primary characters. In Enniscorthy, Jim and Nancy struggle to keep their relationship a secret while Eilis feels isolated and ignored in her tight-knit Italian family in New York. Tony’s family operates as a unit, with his mother next door in a house so close to Eilis’s that it might as well be the same house. She is expected to spend every Sunday at Francesca’s house partaking of a long Sunday dinner in which Tony’s entire extended family is present and in which Tony’s infidelity is well known to everyone—a subject of seemingly lighthearted gossip. The intense closeness of this Italian American family leaves the Irish Eilis feeling like a perpetual outsider, and the prospect that this family will soon welcome a child Tony had with another woman makes it clear to Eilis that the family will never consider her an equal member.

When it becomes clear to her that Tony’s family plans to keep his new child within the family, she realizes how the connectedness of their lives and proximity of their houses will impact her: “She would look out the kitchen window and see Tony’s child being raised by its grandmother, taking its first steps on a lawn on which there was no fence to divide Eilis’s house from Francesca’s” (46).