Unveiling Life’s Quiet Secrets: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Micro-Memoirs Will Change How You See Goodbyes Forever
“Such a stupid, stupid baby. I felt shame but knew that I’d done what I had to do to survive, which is what you should have done that cold Chicago night, October 2008, almost thirty years later, you should never have gone in there alone, you should never have entered the dark red umbilicus, the narrowing tunnel, and when you realized the horror you were being funneled toward, you should have whirled and fled.”
This is Fennelly’s great gift, this skillful creation of a scene, a captured memory, that in the end leads us to a moment of great emotional impact for readers. She does it again and again in this collection, both in the essays about her sister and those about her mother’s decline into dementia. In “A Scrap of Paper That Says Remember,” she writes about her late mother’s cognitive decline. While cleaning out her mother’s home, she finds notes on scraps of paper, including one that says simply “Remember.” The detail lands like a punch.
