by D.W. White
October 24, 2025
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way; Biblioasis; 312 pages; $18.95
What does the novel, as such, do well? This is a question that is not always answered, or asked, by those writing them: the nuances of the form often leaves gaps in the siding. One thing it does quite well, though, is memory; more than any other form (even film), the novel can immerse the reader in the lived past of a character, paralleling the then with the now on the page with the near-simultaneity of truth. This central novelistic technique manifests differently between (and within) the first and the third person, but in the hands of a skilled writer, both can realize the past with the potency of the present. In her latest novel, Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, the prolific poet and novelist Elaine Feeney showcases quite nicely the aptitude of the form in bringing memory to life.
The book’s title is illustrative; our narrator, Claire, is possibly going mad. As she is operating in the first person (mostly—we’ll get there), she is certainly, and literally, doing so on her own terms. The crux of the matter seems to be that her mother has died, at some point antecedent to the initiation of the fictive present, and this has caused her to go a bit “erratic,” in the parlance of her ex’s sister, in the months since. That ex is Tom, and plays an important, if initially ambiguous, role in the events of the plot. Feeney makes fairly liberal use of temporal movement, beginning with a prologue demarcated as-such (an unfortunately rare sight in the contemporary novel, like the top hat or the Oxford comma) that outlines, via conversation with that sister, the troubles our Claire encountered after her mother shuffled off this mortal coil:
Her brother’s latest obsession with the Irish, Sarah told me then, was beyond her. Although she was content, she said, with his decision to take on a project of this—
I hung up on magnitude.
Tom Morton had always refused to visit my family in Athenry, even in the wild spring of 2019 when I fell apart entirely and eventually returned home for good as they say. And so – his imminent arrival – it felt like a trespass.
This neat close to the prologue captures both Claire’s situation and Feeney’s approach; a playful use of language—hanging up on the em dash may bring to mind, for certain erratic book reviewers, the infinitely witty closing line of David Foster Wallace’s Broom of the System—is on display often in the book, as her heroine’s “madness” is explored from the inside-out. The proper first chapter, then brings us to the mother’s death; and the prologue has set us up to read this event not only for itself but for the rupture in Claire’s relationship with Tom we (but not she) know it portends. Such are the benefits of skilled temporal manipulation in the novel, driven by memory and structured by that very elliptical form.
As we move into scenes showcasing the immediate aftermath of her mother’s death, we gradually learn about Claire’s descent, which involves drinking Jameson on the Tube, wearing sweatpants rather often, and looking erratic. Tom, for all we learn about him via Claire’s at turns rhapsodizing and excoriating account, remains somewhat ghostly as a character; which in the first person is at least partially by design. Feeney weaves experimental, inserting into her clean line of chapters bright cards of the past: third-person sections that at times look at Claire from the outside and at others take us back to the site of the family homestead in the 1920, realizing collective memory as communal history. These formal innovations are welcome and interesting; some readers may wonder at their placement besides Claire’s middle-book obsession with, say, the “trad wife” movement on Instagram, a juxtaposition by which Feeney looks to render her protagonist in all her Forsterian roundness.
Indeed Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is a fast-paced, lively novel that at times may feel a touch too quick for its own good; Feeney’s prose is strongest when she allows a moment to slow down and lets Claire paint a scene:
My graduation photo was faded on the wall over her body. I had a head of ringlet curls waterfalling down my back under my mortar board, and everyone was looking awkward and unsure in the university setting. My eyes were closed. Brian had his arm around my back and Father was stood off to the right as though he didn’t belong to us, or us to him. Mother’s make-up was overdone, which was so out of character, and she was wearing the same dress she was now laid out in – lemon with navy piping, her make-up was a fawn shade, so much darker than her neck, and she didn’t look at all like herself.
This moment, of her mother’s wake, is one of several examples in which the novel’s pacing strikes the exact balance between movement and contemplation, and are the passages in (and by) which Claire comes most alive to us. In its blend of plot-excitement and psychological portrait, the book has something for everyone, in a sense, and Feeney is comfortable with the type of code-switching a novel of this order requires.
The tangled love story at its core gives Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way an obvious, and intriguing, parallel to another recent memory-fueled novel set amidst and within the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations, H. S. Cross’ Amanda. Reading (and indeed reviewing) the two books in close succession is an enlightening experience much recommended to the reader; where Feeney is more invested in narrative articulations, Cross shows more commitment to formal avant-gardism and capaciousness. Above all both novels show a willingness to push at the edges of the novel, alongside an understanding of the scope of memory as both compositional propellent and fertile subject matter.
That Feeney’s book operates along a logic analogous to that of memory is no accident; the design is such that the reader feels pulled through Claire’s experiences, for better and for worse. After all, for at least a century the novel, as a form, has rightly been more interested in truth according to its characters than according to the world in which they (or it) live. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way understands, and celebrates, this account of the world, one that has its genesis in our minds and can never escape the shroud of the past through which the present is filtered. It is this madness of the everyday that the novel, on its own terms, can realize.
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Notes and Errata: Memory and Form in Elaine Feeney’s Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Karol Smoczynski from Unsplash
D. W. White is the Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review and Prose Editor of West Trade Review. A Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, his criticism and prose appear in 3:AM, The Florida Review, New Critique, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He teaches fiction workshops at UIC and a graduate seminar on Rachel Cusk in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University.
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