Heating & Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly | Book Review

“If you collected all the drops of days I’ve spent singing “Row, row, row your boat” to children fighting sleep, you’d have an ocean deep enough to drown them many times over.”

A forwarded photo I shared on Instagram stories prompted a conversation with a follower about its source and that’s how I found Heating and Cooling. The photo shared was of the first micro-memoir from this book, titled Married Love, and detailed the author’s husband holding a lifelong grudge against her former boyfriend and using his name for a character to be thrown off a building in his story.This collection is a succinct observation of life in its ridiculous eccentricities. From curious scrutiny in her childhood to matter-of-fact analyses of her relationships, the author focusses on the quality of her words, rather than quantity, to drop the punchline.

With her memoirs ranging from a couple of lines to a page or two, at most, they read like amusing notes journaled in a notebook to capture highlights of each day. They are ensconced in humour while also sharing nuggets of wisdom that come purely from experience.

Some of them were clearly risqué and reveal information which was perhaps unnecessary but as the acknowledgements reveal, perhaps that was the author’s intention.

Barring a handful of memoirs, the rest don’t have much recall value but it is a quick read for when you need a short break and a reason for unabashed laughter.

Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly. Published in 2017 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Book 29 of 2023.

Aquamarine Flavours Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 and a 1/2.

Available on Amazon*.

About Photo: One of the micro-memoir’s titles was Orange-Shaped Hole with an interesting story which I thought was pointlessly funny and inspired me to make a papercraft version.

This 3d papercraft orange is made in the honeycomb papercraft technique using 80sm paper.

About the Author: Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi where she is a four-time teaching award winner. She’s received grants from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, the Academy of American Poets, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize and three times been included in The Best American Poetry Series. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, and a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, all published with W. W. Norton.  A novel she co-authored with her husband, Tom Franklin, called The Tilted World, was published by HarperCollins. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton), was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreads Favourite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize.

She lives in Oxford with husband and their three children. 

You can find her on Instagram and Facebook.

 

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