Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Memoirs

THE IRISH GOODBYE

Beth Ann Fennelly

Micro-Memoirs

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 often-overlooked moments that shape a life, whether moving or perplexing or troubling or gladdening.

These micro-memoirs - some as short as a sentence, some longer in form-dignify 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.

Full of unexpected wit, The Irish Goodbye is a record of the interstitial interactions - encounters with strangers, quirky observations, unexpected flights of fancy - that make up a richly lived life. With keen insight and nimble prose, Fennelly invites readers to share her affirming worldview - one in which even our smallest interactions are rife with possibility.

Beth Ann Fennelly was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband and their three children.

Available products
Book Published 2026-02-24 by W.W. Norton

Comments

Every word in these essays - whether open-armed and loving, broken-hearted and howling, or winking with wit - is perfectly chosen and perfectly placed, and each one shimmers with life. This book faces what it means to say goodbye, but it is also absolutely alight with life.

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. Lots and lots of love. Beth Ann Fennelly dazzles us with her observations and brevity, her beautiful prose, her enormous heart.

This book knocked me sideways. I tore through it in a day and I'm still trying to catch my breath. I loved Heating & Cooling and didn't think Beth Ann Fennelly could do it again, but let me tell you: she's done it again and then some. I've long been a fan of Fennelly's work, but The Irish Goodbye is her best book yet.

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. Fennelly shares with us her recipe for living an enchanted life: Love your family and friends, keenly observe everything around you, work hard, and have a sense of humor about the whole shebang. If The Irish Goodbye is a naked self-portrait, then let us all be naked. As Fennelly says, 'When vulnerability is a burden shared by all, it ceases to be a burden.

What a terrific writer! In language as much poetry as prose, and spectacular poetry at that, Fennelly captures the usually-overlooked moments of our lives.

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 that makes you want to lean in closer, listen harder. Whether writing about slugs, travels around the world, heartbreaking losses, or the glee of people wearing nothing but a smile, this book is such a great catch, such a bounty!