Launch of Elaine Feeney's "Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way"

Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from cosmopolitan London back home to the rugged west of Ireland to care for her dying father. Now, a couple of years later, Claire learns that Tom has moved nearby for work. She must decide if he has come for her or for himself, and unravel what went wrong in their past. Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While she tries to maintain a normal life – obsessing over the internet and trad wives, going to work, and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up old memories and the stories trapped within the walls of the old house that looms nearby. As the violence of the past collides with the mundane reality of Claire’s everyday life, she must confront whether she can escape her history or if she is destined to be immobilized by it forever.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores layers of violence, the lost voices of women, post-colonial repercussions of that violence and the way it can grip generations. Will the secrets revealed alter the course of Claire’s future, and can love exist in a place of pain?

Elaine Feeney is a writer and lectures at the University of Galway. She writes poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction. She has published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise. Her debut novel As You Were won Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’ Brien Prize, The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. It was shortlisted the Rathbones-Folio Prize. She featured widely on Best of 2020 lists and Feeney was chosen by The Observer and The Guardian as a top ten debut novelist in that year. Her short fiction has been published in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work has been published widely including The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Review, The Shop, The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland, Oxford Poetry, Copper Nickel, Stonecutter, Lit Hub, BBC Radio, RTÉ and The Guardian. How to Build a Boat, Feeney’s second novel, was published in 2023. It was nominated for The Booker Prize, shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year and named Best Fiction 2023 by The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times and won Tatler Women’s Award for Literature 2023. Feeney is a graduate of University College Galway, University College Cork and University of Limerick. Her creative output is informed by an inquiry into institutions: restorative justice, gender roles, trauma, illness, empathy in education, nationhood and working-class voices. She is co-founder of the Tuam Oral History Project at University of Galway, where she is responsible for Educational and Creative Output. The project records and archives the first-person narratives of those directly affected by the Tuam Mother and Baby Institution. Feeney was a post-primary teacher in Tuam for many years and was awarded an Outstanding Achievement Award in 2020 by the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland. Her latest poetry collection All the Good Things You Deserve was published in 2024 by Harvill Secker / Vintage. She is currently working on a stage play, TADHG. Elaine’s third novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way was published in May 2025 (Harvill Secker/Vintage).

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