The Irish Goodbye
Micro-Memoirs
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Feb 24, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A new, genre–defying volume that explores family, marriage, motherhood, place, and coming of age with singular wit and emotional clarity.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Fennelly (Heating & Cooling) delivers a modestly profound collection of anecdotes and observations that link together to form a robust self-portrait. At the center of the volume is Fennelly's grief over her sister, who died of bronchial pneumonia at 39. Fennelly renders the fallout with breathtaking candor (reading a novel featuring a character with her sister's name "is like reading my life. The main character keeps tripping over the minor character, who exited early") and bruising humor ("I'm sorry to be stupid in the middle of this memo, but is it really possible I had a child while you were out?"). Elsewhere, Fennelly turns a keen eye toward her home life, discussing the sweet inside jokes and ordinary-but-meaningful domestic rituals that she and her husband share, and directs those same powers of observation toward subjects from yoga to Covid-era isolation. In the process, she transforms the mundane into the metaphysical under the heat of her gaze. With a poet's knack for concision and a novelist's deep well of empathy, Fennelly makes everyday moments worthy of close reading.
