Unveiling Life’s Quiet Secrets: Beth Ann Fennelly’s Micro-Memoirs Will Change How You See Goodbyes Forever
Although the title touts the collection’s micro memoirs, it also contains longer pieces, each employing the same economy of language and vivid imagery found in the shorter work. These include essays about her long friendship with college roommates, a piece about her return to Czechoslovakia, where she taught in her twenties, and one titled “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” about her experience of posing nude for a painter as a woman past 50 for a series of paintings called the Oxford 12. As a woman long past 50 myself, I admired her courage in doing this—and writing about it. (I mean, won’t this send some nosy folks on a hunt to find that painting?)
