Review: Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly

Reviewed by Nancy Posey

Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
Beth Ann Fennelly
W.W. Norton & Company, October 2017
$20.95, 111 pp.
ISBN 978-0-393-60947-9   

Most fans of Oxford, Mississippi’s Beth Ann Fennelly know her  best for her poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks¸ and Open House. In fact, she has served as poet laureate of Mississippi since 2016. After she co-authored a novel, The Tilted Worldi, with her husband, author Tom Franklin, she encountered difficulty getting back to poetry. Instead, she found herself writing in her journal; in fact, she says, “I began to look forward to not writing in my journal every day.”

The pieces she wrote there led to her latest literary endeavor, Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, a slim volume of what might be called “flash memoirs.” The pieces range from a single sentence, such as “Home Button” to “A Reckoning of Kisses,” which weighs in at four pages.

What these small pieces have in common, other than their brevity, is their bite, their ability to surprise. The opening micro-memoir, one of four entitled “Married Love,” wastes not a word, leading to an amused gasp.

Fennelly doesn’t hide behind a fictional screen in this collection. She draws evenly from her childhood and adulthood, swinging between ranges of emotion. In “Safety Scissors,” readers can feel the “snick, snick” of the scissors as her older sister, at four, cuts young Beth Ann’s curls and enviably long lashes.  And while this childhood story and “The Visitation,” set on the way to her sister’s funeral, are told from first person, “The Grief Vacation,” one of the longer pieces (two pages) set five weeks later, unfolds in third person as the protagonist, presumably Fennelly, temporarily steps out of her “grief suit.”

Some of the selections read like poetry. In “I Was Not Going to Be Your Typical” Fennelly not only uses the title as the opening line, but incorporates caesura in her right and left justified lines. The technique, rather than simply appearing as a visual trick, slows down the reading, forcing readers to take in words or phrases in bites as she reminisces about her daughter’s baby days.

In addition to revealing tidbits about her parents and in-laws, her children, her husband Tommy, she also peoples her world with a judgmental manicurist, a friend with a frozen cat in her freezer, old boyfriends, and socially competitive peers. Fennelly moves with ease between these small entries with no concern for chronology.  This small book with its hybrid genre leaves readers wishing for more as they peek over her shoulder as she turns through the pages of her journal.

Nancy Posey lives in Brentwood, TN, where she is an adjunct English professor after retiring from full-time teaching in North Carolina. An avid reader, she participates in two book clubs and blogs about books at discriminatingreader.com. She also writes poetry, plays the mandolin, and always enjoys learning something new.