A01=Beth Ann Fennelly
alzheimers
Author_Beth Ann Fennelly
Category=DNB
Category=DNBA
Category=DNC
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
daughters
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family
friendship
intimacy
memoir
micro-memoir
mississippi
motherhood
ordinary life
poetry
relationships
Product details
- ISBN 9781324117407
- Weight: 239g
- Dimensions: 145 x 211mm
- Publication Date: 24 Feb 2026
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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, in the process dignifying the diminutive through the act of attention. Fennelly explores her roles as a friend, wife, mother and daughter in precise sentences. The longer essays concern Fennelly’s relationships–with a beloved mother-in-law, a decades-long friendship between former college roommates, an artist who paints a series of nude portraits in Fennelly’s town. Interspersed between these longer memoirs are sections of flash non-fiction, a form Fennelly innovated. 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. 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.
Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating and Cooling was praised as:
“A surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.” — New York Times Book Review
“The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity—taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power.” — The Wall Street Journal
Beth Ann Fennelly, poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021, is the author of six books, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. She lives with her husband and their three children in Oxford, Mississippi.
