The Irish Goodbye
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.
“The Irish Goodbye is a marvelous, masterful book of micro-memoirs that add up to a life full of humor, friendship, motherhood, joy, grief, and love. . . . Beth Ann Fennelly dazzles us with her observations and brevity, her beautiful prose, her enormous heart.”
“In these glittering little memoirs, Beth Ann Fennelly removes one protective garment after another until she exposes the poetry beneath life’s troubles and pleasures. . . . If?The Irish Goodbye?is a naked self-portrait, then let us all be naked.”
“This book knocked me sideways. I tore through it in a day and I’m still trying to catch my breath. . . . I’ve long been a fan of Beth Ann Fennelly’s work, but The Irish Goodbye is her best book yet.”
“Every word in these essays―whether open-armed and loving, brokenhearted and howling, or winking with wit―is perfectly chosen and perfectly placed. . . . This book faces what it means to say goodbye, but it is also absolutely alight with life.”
“Beth Ann Fennelly’s writing flickers and shimmers?like minnows just below the water’s surface―quick, sharp, and radiantly alive. Each of these pieces?is a marvel of compression and care, where humor?sidles up next to heartbreak, and ordinary moments?are cast in an enticing, golden light. . . .?This?book is such a great catch, such a bounty!”
“What a terrific writer! In language as much poetry as prose, and spectacular poetry at that, Beth Ann Fennelly captures the usually overlooked moments of our lives.”
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Care for a signed or personalized copy? Order from my fabulous local indie, Square Books, link below or phone (662)-236-2262.