Confessions of a Shanty Irishman is a hybrid memoir, with some fictional elements about an Irish American Catholic family in San Francisco during the mid to late 20th century. It is a coming of age story. It is also a love story.

Here is an excerpt from a review: "'Michael Corrigan proves that the American Irish have their own magical way with words in his spellbinding memoir of growing up on the wrong side of Market Street in San Francisco…But the secularization of a good Irish Catholic boy under the too strong temptations of the later 20th century is just the bare bones of what ‘Confessions of a Shanty Irishman’ is about. Like all great Irish literature, this book is about death and family, what holds people together and what pulls them apart.” Gerald Nicosia, San Francisco Chronicle.