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 Fennelly’s 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 Fennelly’s 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.