Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

by Beth Ann Fennelly

Overview

“A surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.” —New York Times Book Review

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Alternatingly wistful and wry, ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to shape a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393356489
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/25/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	178,021
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections, Unmentionables, Tender Hooks, and Open House; two memoirs, Heating & Cooling and Great with Child; and a novel, The Tilted World, coauthored with her husband, Tom Franklin. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, and is also the state’s Poet Laureate. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Editorial Reviews

"Wise, irreverent, funny.…Everyone should read this book."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Varying in length from a single sentence to several pages, the essays in [Heating & Cooling] are told with wry self-awareness and compassion."

Poets & Writers

"A rich, varied, and refreshingly unpredictable portrait of a woman in her prime.… Readers, you are in for a hootenanny of a wild ride. This is Fennelly at her most laid-bare, wickedly funny, and irrepressibly poetic best."

The Kenyon Review

"An author of bold perception, powerful femininity, and candid vulnerability. This deceptively slim, convention-defying collection delivers unerringly generous rewards."

Booklist

"Part of the fun of reading Heating & Cooling is watching Fennelly play with language, making every word count, all while digging into the heart of things.… This tiny book packs many mighty punches as Fennelly takes on Catholicism, cancer, marriage, motherhood, and mortality."

Clarion Ledger

"[Fennelly] has an eye for the absurd, for those telling, little moments that make up a life and build memories. Some are humorous, some are moving. Others are heartbreaking."

Florida Weekly

"Heating and Cooling contains essays that are sometimes as short as 10 words . . . but add up to a surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life."

New York Times Book Review

"Imagine the hundred things you enjoy doing most in the world. Reading Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling is more fun than 95 of them."

Richard Russo

"The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity—taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power."

Wall Street Journal

"Beth Ann Fennelly’s genre-defying collection is so engaging and readable that you won’t even notice how much you’re learning about confronting the hardest challenge we all share: being human. Wise, irreverent, funny. . . . Everyone should read this book."

Atlanta Journal Constitution - Best Southern Books of 2017

"This collection will invite you into the delicate balance between the challenging, sometimes squalid, human condition and the beauty and sadness of the transcendent."

The Rumpus

"Consistently entertaining. . . poised, eloquent, and full of moments of tenderness."

Electric Literature

"Beth Ann Fennelly brings a poet’s sensibility to Heating & Cooling. Each entry is both insightful and precise, a perfect pearl of memory. By marking out these 52 moments, she draws a portrait of a life that is deeply felt and fully awake. I will be the first in line when there are 52 more."

Ann Patchett

★ 10/15/2017
The subtitle of Mississippi poet laureate Fennelly's memoir provides readers all the explanation they need. Each of the "52 micro-memoirs" range in length from a sentence to several pages, as the author covers motherhood, marriage, childhood, family, writing, her parents, the death of a beloved sister, the quirks of neighbors and friends, aging, her husband, and a multitude of other observations. It may seem incongruous, but Fennelly packs a lot into each short piece, with some lighter in subject matter and others with a sudden punch-in-the-gut feel, weighted with existential exploration. VERDICT Potent despite their brevity, many of Fennelly's micromemoirs bring hefty topics to the surface; the lack of excessive text allows readers to fill in the gaps. Readers who enjoyed Anne Lamott's memoirs (Bird by Bird; Hallelujah Anyway) will delight in these pieces. [See "Summering Down," ow.ly/rGF330fkneS.]—Rachael Dreyer, Eberly Family Special Collections Lib., Pennsylvania State Univ.

Library Journal

2017-07-03
A poet and fiction writer delivers 52 "micro-memoirs"—some just one sentence, some a couple of pages—that offer insight into her life, the lives of loved ones, and the overall human condition.Fennelly (Unmentionables: Poems, 2008, etc.), the former poet laureate of Mississippi, mostly avoids identifying names in the essays—which were previously published in a variety of venues, including Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and the Oxford American—but sometimes it is obvious whom she is referencing or addressing. Five of the essays scattered throughout the slim book carry the title "Married Love" and refer to her husband, novelist Tom Franklin. Other essays refer directly to the author's children or her parents. Irreverence abounds, as evidenced in the acknowledgements, in which Fennelly thanks her mother by name before adding that she "affirms me daily in many loving ways, as she has done from the start, despite noting that ‘This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.' " Some of the essays indeed refer to sex but mostly with humor or melancholy. Self-deprecation appears throughout, as well; Fennelly never takes herself too seriously. Other subjects include the author's doubting of Catholicism, the residents of Oxford, Mississippi, where she lives, and her years as a student. The title essay, previously published in the Southern Review, begins with a service call from an HVAC repairman and then touches on a variety of other topics, including poetry, babies, cookies, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Although the concept and structure of the book are experimental, on the whole, the writing is more straightforward, lucidly composed, and often highly evocative. In "A Reckoning of Kisses," she writes, "he placed his beer on the pool's lip, then pulled me into his. I'll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a freshly-smoked Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high." A sleek, delightful collection.

Kirkus Reviews