Fifteen years ago, all of my work was around writing – I was fortunate to be a paid blogger (long before popular blogs offered writers ‘exposure’ rather than money), and I also did some technical writing. When people discovered what I did, they invariably asked, “So, are you going to write a book?” No, I’d say, stating that although I liked to read books, my attention span was too short to write one.

But when I read Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling, a collection of ‘micro-memoirs’, I thought that a micro-memoir writing project was something I could attempt (not with a view to publish, simply for my own record). Vignettes, with no chronological order, seems doable.

Fennelly is a poet, and her neat, economical use of words comes through in each of the 52 micro-memoirs. Some are a sentence long, others span a few pages. All are eloquent, and many are slyly funny.

Although each memoir can be read as a standalone piece, references to particular people and events thread through the collection. For example, there are five stories titled ‘Married Love’, where we glimpse Fennelly’s relationship with her husband from its beginning through to the birth of their children and beyond.

And then there are the simplest of lines that made me gasp –

I remember being in the car on the way to my sister’s surprise funeral.

The unexpected death of her sister is examined at length in The Grief Vacation, where Fennelly recounts having to go to a writers’ conference and finds relief in being surrounded by people who aren’t offering condolences.

She taught a class on metaphor which was well received. She dined with the other writers and when they laughed she laughed and observed herself laughing… She drank wine at the wine-drinking times and signed books at the book-signing times. Beach walks occurred. Occasionally she felt something hysterical winging up through her throat, the propulsion of it could almost lift her off the ground, a howl, or a laugh, or some combination new to the human register, but she did not vocalise those vowels.

Fennelly returns home after three days, and as she disembarks the plane she steps ‘into her suit of grief’, describing its weight as ‘dear’ to her. Again, her spare words have great impact.

4/5 Beautifully balanced glimpse of the ordinary and extraordinary parts of life.

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 28): Belfast 6°-20° and Melbourne 13°-21°.