THE IRISH GOODBYE

The former Mississippi Poet Laureate explores love and loss in an experimental essay collection.

Fennelly intersperses short nonfiction pieces she calls “micro-memoirs” with longer, more traditional essays about relationships that have fundamentally shaped her life in a variety of ways. These essays explore topics like her elderly mother’s mental decline, her relationship with a group of college friends she calls “the roomies,” and an artist who painted the author posing nude. Between these longer pieces are micro-memoirs capturing mundane moments with poetic efficiency. A chapter titled “Birthday,” for example, is only one sentence long: “Even my earlobes look old.” Others are about the author’s deceased sister, her marriage, her mother-in-law, her battle with garden slugs during the pandemic, and a house full of strangers who accidentally received the author’s annual family Christmas cards. A number of essays explore her sister’s untimely death from pneumonia. In a particularly poignant piece titled “Because My Editor Suggests I Reveal How My Sister Died,” she describes the uncertainties that prevented her from revealing her sister’s cause of death in her previous works, writing, “How dare you people expect me to explain my sister’s death to you, a thing I’ve never successfully explained even once to myself.” Many other essays sparkle with understated delight. Although the book is about the deaths of people, ideas, eras, and self-perceptions, it’s a fundamentally optimistic work concerned with exploring both the emotional underpinnings and transformational potential of aging, grief, and love.

A lyrical and tender essay collection about loss.