Back in 2018, I gave a rave review to Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. I was quite taken with her poet’s takes on the prosaic world, and I’ve been looking forward to the follow-up, which comes eight years later in the form of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. It’s a different book, to be sure — the author is older, wiser, possibly even funnier, but the “micro” element of the memoirs isn’t as prominent.
To be sure, The Irish Goodbye contains equivalents to the ultra-short essays found in Heating & Cooling. The entire text of “Birthday,” for instance, is “Even my earlobes look old.” And on the next page, the micro-memoir of “Number One Sign You Shouldn’t Send That Letter” consists of a single sentence: “Your tongue, dragging across the envelope glue, leaves a ghost of Malbec.”
On balance, though, in The Irish Goodbye, Fennelly allows herself more room to follow an idea or image or emotion wherever it wants to take her. In Heating & Cooling, a long piece might run six pages, but now we have essays of 12, 15, and even 17 pages, which are only “micro” if you are comparing your nonfiction to that of David Foster Wallace.