Description
What can we learn from an ordinary life observed with extraordinary skill? In The Irish Goodbye, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of the small moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother, and daughter, documenting a brush with an old flame or the devastating death of her sister in crystalline, precise sentences.
The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships–with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between five former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town, for which she poses. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash nonfiction, a form Fennelly innovated in the genre-defying Heating & Cooling. With dazzling verve and wit, they capture the interstitial interactions–encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy–that make up a richly lived life.
The Irish Goodbye offers a rare pleasure: intimacy. With emotional clarity and nimble prose, Fennelly invites readers to share her affirming worldview–one in which even our smallest interactions are rife with possibility.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Beth Ann Fennelly
Published: 02/24/2026
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9781324117407
Pages: 144
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 0.70″ H x 8.10″ L x 5.50″ W
About the Author
Fennelly, Beth Ann: – Beth Ann Fennelly, poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021, is the author of six books, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. She lives with her husband and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi.
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