When Canberra author Marion Halligan was mulling over possible titles for her latest novel, several mischievous and obscure options presented themselves.

At one point, she half-considered pulling one of the opening lines from Emily Dickinson's famous poem about death.

"I did think of calling it 'He kindly stopped for me', but when I said that, [my publisher] nearly died of horror," she says, chuckling.

It's not the done thing, it seems, to refer or even allude to death in the title of a novel, even if death is, undeniably, its over-arching theme. Perhaps it's best, suggests Halligan, to describe Goodnight Sweetheart - a title chosen, ultimately, for being both apt and memorable - as a story about life instead. Or, as is the case of many of her novels, several stories about several lives, each carried out at its own pace and on its own terms, but inevitably intersecting and intertwining with the others when the moment is right.

The story opens with prominent lawyer William Cecil dying of a heart attack while swimming laps in a public pool, and fans out to observe how each person in his life – a brother, three wives, a child from each and a mistress thrown in for good measure – reacts to the news.

It's a fertile premise, and one perfectly suited to Halligan's signature style. Set mainly in Canberra, the reader is transported, variously, between a beautiful house in Forrest, a flat in Dickson and a cluttered home in the inner north, as well as a fishing town on the South Coast, a beachside Sydney house and an urban forest in London. It might sound frantic and fast-paced, but the reader is eased into each scene carefully and given time to adjust – so much so that it can be a wrench to move onto the next one, although there's almost always the chance to go back.

Not surprisingly, short stories have always been Halligan's first love; she made her first foray into writing this way when her children were small, and found the format suited the hours she was keeping – small, contained narratives could be plotted, mulled over between piano lessons, and committed to paper during naptimes.

"I rather like that way of looking at things because it seems to me that there's a quite serious truth in it, that when you have a bunch of characters, each one of them is the sort of hero of their own life, and they're bit players in other people's lives," she says.

"You do get to an end, there is finally a sort of linear progression, but it's not very linear, and whenever I write things, I don't give the chapters numbers, I give them names because I swap them around like a jigsaw puzzle after it's done, and change the order and put things in different places. It's the way I like to look at the world, really. I don't see it as a very linear world."

She likes, too, that the reader has the added pleasure of recognition when an earlier character pops up later – a familiar face only visible for an instant in someone else's story. This is how life works, she says.

And what of death? Anyone who's read more than one of Halligan's works – Goodbye Sweetheart is her 11th novel, and she has five collections of short stories – will have picked up on certain preoccupations in her writing, death being one.

We're sitting at the long table in her cheerful, cluttered kitchen, clearly the heart and soul of her inner north Canberra home, and one that is pretty much the personification of the kitchen described by one of the novel's characters. But that kitchen, in that fictional home, is evoked mainly as a memory, a place the character has given up following the death of a child.

Small, disturbing anecdotes, about dead babies, abandoned children, murdered brides, ghosts, are apt to pop up all over the place – as they do in real life – but in Halligan's books, they seem to linger and spread an inescapable ambiance. She readily admits that she's drawn to these types of stories, and suspects they form a seam through the psyches of many others.

But, at 74, she says a preoccupation with death is not unusual, although she has had to deal with more than most; her husband of 35 years, Graham Halligan, died of cancer in 1998, and their daughter Lucy died of a heart condition in 2004, aged 38.

"I think we've been inclined not to think about death, whereas I think you should, I think it's a hugely important factor in our lives," she says.

"It's one of the things I think about. I think, 'Graham's died, Lucy's died, they did it very well,' and in a way I think it's not something that worries me because they did it so gracefully and so elegantly that I think, well, it's just something that happens."

Halligan vividly remembers being told, upon learning that Lucy had been born without a pulmonary valve, to have her christened immediately. She and Graham obliged, not because they were believers, she said, but because "it was a good idea to have a ceremony for small person who was going to die. But she didn't die, she lived until she was 38. So, in a way, that was an achievement."

In Lucy's case, she says, her death, though the result of a lifelong condition, was as quick and free of trauma as it could have been: she died suddenly, at home, in her sleep, with the cat curled up beside her.

But she says her son, James, who found Lucy the day she died, is still irredeemably sad for the loss of his older sister.

"One of the things that Lucy used to say to him was, 'I'm older than you and I always will be', and he'd say, 'No, no, no! One day I'll catch up!' And then he realised that he never would, that she was right, and this was an argument that they'd had. And he said to me, 'I've caught up to Lucy now, and I don't like that.'"

Despite such subject matter, our conversation, much like Goodbye Sweetheart itself, is not at all melancholy. Halligan has a way of making pathos the stuff of life. Today, for example, is James' birthday.

"He has this habit of ringing up on his birthday and wishing me a happy birthday, which does make sense," she says, laughing.

"It's my happy birthday - it was a very happy birthday for me!"

She also has a six-year-old granddaughter she clearly adores, and a cast of like-minded literary friends whose names crop up repeatedly in conversation, much like characters in a book. And it's the topics of these many running conversations that give her fertile material for central narratives, or smaller side-themes.

To wit: children and difficulty conceiving – another weighted motif that crops up repeatedly. In Goodbye Sweetheart, for example, a character has a minor mental breakdown on a kitchen floor at the spectre of a miscarriage.

"That's a huge theme of mine, I realise that, because in the late '50s and early '60s, the people I knew [who] were getting married, not always but often were pregnant when they got married," she says.

"And the claim was, 'We did it once in the back of a Morris Minor and I got pregnant!' And of course that's the clue – if you could do anything like that in the back of a Morris Minor you were pretty young, pretty limber and probably pretty fertile."

Then the narrative of the '50s – unwanted or unplanned pregnancies – gave way to liberation of the '60s, a golden time of such problems being pre-empted, solved or avoided altogether.

But jump forward another generation and Halligan is at a baby shower for her 30-something daughter-in-law. Suddenly, she is surrounded by another, more searing refrain.

"It was full of these terrible narratives of young women trying to have babies and failing, and going through four goes of IVF and that was it, they couldn't afford any more, and they couldn't do it anymore. It's unpleasant, it's horrible," she says.

"I thought, we've gone from this thing in my youth, where babies were always turning up where they weren't wanted, to people wanting babies and they can't have them."

And then, of course, there's marriage, and men. What of the man in Goodnight Sweetheart who, as the title suggests, exits this life almost breezily, leaving others to unravel his secrets? It's no accident that as the over-arching story marches on, and each character unspools each individual story, the nominally central character – father, husband, ex-husband, lover – becomes less and less substantial. He recedes, and it's what he probably deserves. But despite what readers might be tempted to believe, none of the characters are based on real people (although the Forrest house exists, as does the fancy kitchenware shop).

"People make these assumptions, but in a way you invent characters - you probably get something they say or something they do or something they think, and you make up a person from there," she says.

"And if you do it properly, a writer will say you can't make characters do things they don't want to, which sounds very fey but it's not. Because when you've created a character, they do what they want in the sense that they act in the way that they would act. They act according to their nature."

But back to reality: Halligan is currently working on a memoir written in the same format as many of her novels, in that it doesn't start at the beginning or progress to the end. And, while her agent would love for her to write a memoir about her literary life, this one is really about Lucy. And maybe everything is, a little bit. How, after all, does a writer like Halligan disentangle real life from literary life?

Goodbye Sweetheart is published by Allen & Unwin.

Marion Halligan will be in conversation with Colin Steele from 6pm-7pm on Wednesday, April 1, in the Theatrette of the Sir Roland Wilson Bldg #120, at the Australian National University.