The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

ISBN: 1324117400

Author: Fennelly, Beth Ann

Condition: New

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 Fennellys 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 Fennellys 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.