Courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company
"The Irish Goodbye" by Beth Ann Fennelly
The first time I met Beth Ann Fennelly—the only time in person and not in print—she was wearing a necklace made out of a shotgun shell and a doll’s arm. I’ve loved her ever since.
Her first book of micro-memoirs, Heating and Cooling, has done me an enormous service as the gift I give when I don’t know what to give someone: “I didn’t know if you liked wine, so here’s a book that changed how I think about prose.” The publication this month of her second such volume, The Irish Goodbye, now means that I’ll have to give people both tomes. Heating and Cooling felt like making a new friend; The Irish Goodbye has the vibe of the first time you and your new friend open up over too much wine.
Micro-memoirs, for those who have not yet had the pleasure, are snippets of life, written more like prose poems than narratives: the shortest are a line, the longest a few pages. The topics are as varied as the ingredients of a full life—Fennelly reevaluates her memory of a lonely year in the Czech Republic, strips down for an artist, allows her son to quote her profane commentary on garden slugs—but the crux of the book, and one of the turning points of Fennelly’s life, is the premature death of her elder sister.
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Fennelly shows us this loss from many angles, a process familiar to anyone who has ever grieved, from grim jokes about her sister’s nineteenth birthday serving as her midlife crisis to a snappish response to her editor’s recommendation that she explain how her sister died. Layered over this old scar is the fresh disaster of Fennelly’s mother’s dementia, and she returns more than once to the idea of being alone in a memory, unable to consult her late sister or her mother, declining during the “action” of much of the book and now deceased. She’s her own sole corroborating witness, and she acknowledges more openly than most of us how unreliable memory is even in the absence of an illness that pulls it away.
"For a work concerned in large part with loss, with goodbyes both Irish and prolonged, The Irish Goodbye is, at turns, playful and comforting."
For a work concerned in large part with loss, with goodbyes both Irish and prolonged, The Irish Goodbye is, at turns, playful and comforting. Startled by a noise as she gathers daffodils in a vacant lot, Fennelly prepares to defend herself physically but morally: it is better to gather the daffodils than to let them fade uncherished behind a No Trespassing sign. “These are for my mother, who is ailing,” she prepares to cry at the imagined judge, admitting at the end that since neither coyote nor goblin confronted her, she kept the daffodils for herself. The last essay in the book, an account of her nude modeling session for a painter working on a set of portraits of twelve Oxford residents, is both hilarious and reflective: Fennelly’s glee at seeing her buniony, inelegant feet perfectly captured in oils made me, just briefly, feel better about how my neck looks in photographs. (Not much better, but still.)
In a moment of absurd serendipity, Fennelly was once able to produce, genie-like, a gin and tonic for a writer she admired when he mentioned wanting one. She and Tim O’Brien were both at an afterparty that had run dry, but Fennelly had popped to the liquor store on the way—an occasional necessity in the dry-county-dotted inland South—and had gin, tonic, and even a fresh lime in the trunk of her nearby car, providing them all to O’Brien like three treasures in a fairy tale. I don’t have a car, and I live far away from Fennelly’s Oxford, which is lucky, because if I still lived in New Orleans I’d have to keep a full bar in my trunk, just in case I ran into her, just so I’d have what she wanted.
The Irish Goodbye will be available for purchase on February 24, 2026. wwnorton.com
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