'Can I Fix You Something?' Love, Loss, and The Irish Goodbye

Credit: Salvationsouth.com

“My mother-in-law was good.

I bet that sentence hasn’t been written very often.

Betty Franklin was the kind of good one’s tempted to call saintly. But we shouldn’t call good people saints because that strips away their humanity—and responsibility for their actions. I’d wager she came out inclined toward goodness, but she was also good because she worked at it.

I’d known her for twenty years before I perceived that. Once, when the hall bathroom was occupied, I went into the one attached to her bedroom. On her mirror was a Post-it. “It’s not about YOU,” she admonished herself.”

Chuck Reece: It’s not about you. Those might be considered words to live by. And the words you just read were from a wonderful writer named Beth Ann Fennelly and an essay she wrote called “My Mother-in-Law in the Mirror,” a tribute to her husband’s late mother. Beth Ann and her husband, the novelist Tom Franklin, live in Oxford, Mississippi. Beth Ann was the Poet Laureate of that state for five years, starting in 2016. Tommy has written three novels of his own and collaborated with his wife on another. His first, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, turned the complexities of cross-racial friendships in the South into one of the finest crime novels you’ll ever read.

And I had read Beth Ann’s poetry long before I met her a few years ago at the Mississippi Book Festival. And since then, my wife and I have had dinner with her and Tommy in Oxford. Beth Ann’s had dinner with us here in Atlanta. And as we got to know one another, we began to talk — as Southerners do — about mama and them. That’s how I learned that in the late 'teens, she and Tommy found themselves in a difficult spot. Beth Ann’s mother-in-law, Betty Franklin, and Beth Ann’s mother, Mary Ann McNamara Malich, were suffering simultaneously from Alzheimer’s disease.

Or, as Beth Ann writes in her latest book, “My mother-in-law has dementia, and my husband’s mother-in-law also has dementia. My husband and I are married. What, I ask you, are the odds?”

That book is called The Irish Goodbye: Micro Memoirs. As Beth Ann was writing it, after the death of her mother-in-law but as she was still caring for her own mother, she also found herself writing for the first time about the grief she carried from the unexpected death of her sister two decades before.

Beth Ann Fennelly: These twin deaths do, you know, always kind of cable through my life and through my dreams for very different reasons that the shock of my sister's unexpected death and then the long, very drawn out, incredibly sad death my mother had of dementia. I moved here to Oxford in October of 2020 during COVID when she didn't want to move, but she could no longer live alone. And I took care her from then until when she died on Nov. 4. She actually died after the book was turned in. So would I think of this book as a period marking the end of this? I would love to think so because both those things have been so hard.

Maybe my mom's death will recede a little bit and I'll begin to remember her when she was younger and more competent and had more of her personality. Maybe my sister's death will start to recede a little bit now that I finally wrote about it after 20 years, which is something I really resisted doing for a long time.

Chuck Reece: On Salvation South Deluxe, we’re going to talk with Beth Ann about The Irish Goodbye, which details her grief through, as the rest of the title says, “micro-memoirs” — passages that range from only 17 words to several pages, and that will actually make you laugh out loud more often than you’d think possible in a book about grief. The Irish Goodbye is, in my estimation, one of the finest reckonings with "The Crap Life Hands Us" that I’ve ever read. It is a redeeming and generous book—and written in a form, a Fennelly invention called the “micro-memoir,” that has something to teach all of us who have suffered loss and lived to tell the tale.

I’m your host, Chuck Reece, and this is Salvation South Deluxe.

 

ACT I

Chuck Reece: Now you might find yourself asking, what makes Beth Ann Fennelly a Southerner? After all, this show is called Salvation South and she was born in New Jersey and raised in Chicago. Her roots are in some of the coldest places in the North. 

But I believe there are two types of Southerners. The first are the folks born and raised in the South. And even though they may leave and plant roots elsewhere, a part of their hearts will always belong to this region.

The second type is those who move here and decide to stay. But before they can be called a Southerner, they have to earn their badge, I think. Sometimes, that means living here for a couple decades. And sometimes, that means their soul grasps what it means to be a Southerner and they settle right in. 

That second type is where Beth Ann fit in in the beginning. And now she’s lived in Mississippi for a quarter of a century.

Beth Ann met her Alabama-born husband Tom Franklin in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they were working on their MFA degrees in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. They moved together to Mississippi in 2001, just as Beth Ann’s ​​first collection of poems, Open House, won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book. Open House began a stream of national acclaim for her writing. That acclaim has continued ever since. 

In 2004, Tender Hooks, her second collection of poems, came out, and right out of the gate, with its first poem, “Bite Me,” it blossomed with the sass and snark of the finest Southern conversationalists. But it was her third collection, Unmentionables, from 2008, that convinced me Beth Ann Fennelly had a grasp of the Southern Thing as firm as any of the born-here folks. A writer who did not understand the South could never have written my favorite poem from that collection, and that was called “The Kudzu Chronicles,” which begins like this:

Kudzu sallies into the gully
like a man pulling up a chair
where a woman was happily dining alone.

To see our Official Regional Weed as it is — as ignorant to its own offensiveness as a tipsy frat boy — confirmed that the writer and her work had put down deep roots. Her Southerner-by-choice street cred was locked in.

But I did not expect then that Unmentionables would mark her last collection of poetry. To say it is her last, of course, might very well be wrong — and I hope it is. But fans of Fennelly’s poems, like me, have not received another collection in 18 years now. 

She and her husband in 2014 published a co-written novel called The Tilted World. Then, three years later, Fennelly pioneered a genre she created herself: the micro-memoir, with a book called Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. The Kenyon Review, the prestigious publication that gave Fennelly her first big break, called Heating & Cooling  “a hootenanny of a wild ride.” But this second collection of micro-memoirs dives into the deepest of all human experiences: the pain we feel when we lose — and as we are losing — the people who created us.

Beth Ann Fennelly: What I would say is this, I'm not interested in holding back. At this point in my life, I'm 54. I'm not interested in shrouding or protecting myself. I'm not interested in Photoshopping my life or my emotions. At this point in my life, I'm more interested in being vulnerable than I am about looking good.

Chuck Reece: Grief is a heavy subject and sometimes we want to avoid it. However, when weighted down with grief, it can be hard to remember that positives can be found. Beth Ann uses her writing to find that lightheartedness. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: Maybe if I was trying to write a single narrative, it would have kind of felt a little unrelenting or oppressive, really, in its sadness because my basic worldview is that life is kind of funny. You know, like life has a lot of absurdity and ridiculousness and humor and levity to it. And so even when I'm approaching these really serious topics, there are certain ways in which I'm coming at it from a weird angle or, you know, enjoying something strange about it. 

Even, for example, I have a piece at the end of the book that's about my friend Lloyd, whose mother also died of Alzheimer's. We would talk on the phone about how horrible it was to see our moms go through this. And we vowed that we'd help each other commit suicide at the end of our lives if it had gotten that bad. And there's just this kind of funny moment where I show it to my husband. I show this piece I've written about Lloyd that we had made this plan to my husband. And he said, "Well, you know, at the very end, I want to be with you. I want to be the one to murder you." And I argue with him like, "No, you couldn't murder me. You love me too much to murder me." And he says, "No, I love you so much. I would murder you." And we have this whole conversation like, that's so sweet. It's so romantic. And I know that that's really absurd, but it's also pretty much exactly as it happened. I mean, I didn't have a tape recorder going obviously, but the dialogue that plays out in that piece is in fact the dialogue we had. Being in this horrible situation doesn't mean that there's not time for levity.

Chuck Reece: Beth Ann’s new set of micro-memoirs reads like a tribute to the women it’s written about, which is something modern society too frequently fails to do. But some of the pieces in The Irish Goodbye are more for those who are still here. The essay you heard a piece of at the beginning of today’s episode, “My Mother-in-Law in the Mirror,” may sound like it was written for Betty Franklin, but Beth Ann says it’s really more for Betty’s son, her husband Tommy. I asked her how Tommy reacted when he first read it.

Beth Ann Fennelly: He told me he was grateful that someone saw her. Because, as you pointed out, Chuck, those are the women that we look over or look past. In our culture, if you don't contribute money, you're not really contributing anything. And the choices that she made always to put other people forward, they're not rewarded in this earthly life, y'know? So I think he thought when he read that that I saw her clearly and he told me he was glad that I had written it.

Chuck Reece: In fact, Betty Franklin probably wouldn’t have wanted anyone to write about her at all. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: She hated attention. She didn't want compliments. She didn't want people to talk about her. She wasn't interested in anyone noticing her. She hated to be in photographs. She was embarrassed by gifts. She didn't trust compliments. What she wanted to do was serve Christ, really, truly. She was someone who was deeply religious and made religion look good where so many of the people frankly in my life who are super-religious don't make it seem very appealing. I'm so lucky that I had her in my life.

Like I have this really nice husband. He's a really good person and he loves me completely. And I think he learned to love from his mother. I think she was love. 

Chuck Reece: Here’s Beth Ann reading some more from “My Mother-in-Law in the Mirror.”

“Her pleasures were simple; her greatest was being of use. Six of her eleven grandchildren lived next door, and two others close by (the remaining three, our own, were a six-hour drive away, an almost unthinkable distance for her, though the Franklins did make the drive a few times). “Can I fix you something?” she’d ask when a small body hurtled though her back door. Even in her late seventies, her own body failing, she’d ask that, ratcheting up her La-Z-Boy recliner and using the remote to change her Hallmark movie to Blue’s Clues. She preferred serving others invisibly, without praise. She hated to be photographed, was embarrassed by gifts, distrusted compliments, dreaded clothes shopping, avoided all things fussy or expensive. She played the piano—when she was alone in the house. Her “beauty regimen” consisted of washing her face with Pond’s cold cream. I never saw her drink a drop of alcohol. Married at age eighteen, she never had a job outside the home, never earned a single dollar. I never once heard her express a wish for anything advertised on television or mentioned by a neighbor. I never once heard her ask for anything besides photos of her grandchildren. 

Maybe I’m so fascinated with Betty’s goodness because we’re opposites. Any Post-it stuck above my vanity mirror would proclaim, “Why YES, darling! It IS about you!” We’re opposites in every way but the most important one—loving her son. Tommy grew up in Dickinson, Alabama—a country store and a cluster of houses surrounded by piney woods. His asthma was so bad when he was a boy that he couldn’t sleep at night. He had to sit up in bed because lying down made the wheezing worse. Betty sat in a chair beside his bed every night, talking with him, sometimes reading him stories so he wouldn’t feel scared when the breaths were difficult to pull into his lungs. So he wouldn’t be alone with the owl-punctured dark. Tommy tells me they’d talk for hours, until finally Betty would say, “Hear that?” and he’d listen, and there it was, a log truck rumbling down the road. The log trucks started right before dawn, so this was always a welcome rumble, the signal that soon Tommy would be able to breathe. She’d kiss his forehead and he’d slide down a bit in bed and she’d say, “You can sleep now, sugar. You can sleep,” and she’d return to her bed for her own few hours of slumber.”

Chuck Reece: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll hear more from author Beth Ann Fennelly about how she created the form she calls the micro-memoir.

 

ACT II

Chuck Reece: Welcome back to Salvation South Deluxe. As I mentioned earlier, the full title of Beth Ann Fennelly’s latest book is The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs. 

The idea of writing collections of short pieces that blurred the lines between poetry — the form that made her famous — and prose, came to her after the 2013 novel she co-wrote with her husband, The Tilted World, failed to sell as many copies as they had hoped.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Before I published my first collection of micro memoirs, Heating and Cooling, 52 Micro Memoirs, I co-wrote a novel with my husband. We collaborated on this project together. And it took us a long time. It took us four years. And that's pretty high stakes. You know, if you write something and you spend four years of your life on it and it fails, that's bad. If you and your spouse jointly spend four years on something and it fails, you know, that's — that's really bad. So after I wrote and published that novel with my husband, I didn't know what I was going to write next. You know, my training is in poetry. My first love is poetry, but I was starting to kind of fall in love with the sentence and its possibilities. And I thought, "Well, maybe I'm going to write my own novel. Maybe I'm a novelist now." So every day would go to my notebook. And I would open it up and I would put down funny little thoughts or bits of overheard conversation or, you know, crazy memories that I had that I didn't know why I had them. And I kept waiting for them to add up to a novel, waiting for them to add up to this big arc of experience. And, you know, they kept not doing that. And I felt frustrated because I wasn't writing, but I was having fun. And also, as I've gotten older, I've learned to follow the fun. If you're having fun, keep doing what you're doing. 

So one day I was flipping through my notebook and I was reading these little pieces and I was thinking, "Well, you know, it's not a novel." It's not poetry. It's not the type of essays that I'd published before.

Then I thought of the term "micro memoir." And weirdly, when I thought of that term, it almost gave me permission to understand I'd written a book of them. And since writing Heating and Cooling, I've stuck with that form because I'm still learning from it. I feel like the micro memoir still has more to teach me. So I think I'll keep writing in this form until I feel like I'm not learning anymore. 

Chuck Reece: Even those of us who choose not to write the stories of our lives, we still have these stories we tell ourselves. Think of your high-school years, for instance, and I’ll bet you ten dollars to a doughnut that you have two or three stories that you think explain exactly who you were during that period of your life. 

But sometimes, when we revisit those foundational stories, we discover that we haven’t been telling ourselves the whole truth. One of the micro-memoirs in Beth Ann’s new book is called “The Stories We Tell About the Stories We Tell.” It revisits a year she spent teaching English on the Czech‑Polish border right after the fall of Communism.

Beth Ann Fennelly: I had a pretty unusual experience after I graduated college. I taught English on the Czech-Polish border for a year. This was in 1993. Communism had just fallen. The Eastern Bloc was crumbling. They needed English teachers. And I volunteered to go do it for a year. And Americans at that time were starting to arrive in Prague. And Prague was filling with expats who loved the cheap rent and cobblestone streets and there was an English language bookstore and you know, they had their community. I was definitely not in that situation. I was on the far side of the country in a coal mining village, very heavily communist. There was no one else who spoke English and I was very lonely. You know, I just couldn't make friends. I kept trying and nobody liked me. I was embarrassed by that. I just toughed out the year and kinda went home in shame knowing that I had failed. And that's when I was 21. Well, flash forward, I'm not able to make it back to that country until I'm 42, twice my life. Going back, now I'm a mom of three kids, I'm being invited to give a reading in the U.S. embassy and I'm feeling so proud of myself and special and going back to this country where no one liked me and I had no friends and I went back and I went back to my coal-mining village and all these people showed up and I realized I'd pretty much gotten everything wrong. 

When I arrived there, they were so poisoned by communism, by surveillance, by being spied on that they had no ability, no resources to open themselves to a stranger. When I was trying to make friends with them, I probably threatened them. You know, I'm sure I was terrifying in my own way. Just trying to get to know them probably was very threatening.

And I realized the stories I'd been telling myself about what it was like to be there as a young person, you know, and the stories that I even used to motivate myself, like, "Wow, you know, too bad you didn't like me, I'm gonna go on and do this and this thing," All of that was wrong. They liked me as much as they could. And I was so naive, I just didn't understand it. I was so young and dumb. And it was actually rather painful to discover that they had liked me all along, because I had to revise my thinking. And we understand we can revise our writing. We forget we can revise our thinking too, but it's hard to do that. It's hard to update what you know about yourself and see your actions in a new light.

Chuck Reece: Speaking of seeing herself in a new light, Beth Ann ends this book with an essay called “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body.” 

That's right: “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body.” 

It’s about how a California artist named Robert Townsend, who makes these hyperrealistic paintings of people, came to Oxford, Miss., and wound up painting a dozen Oxford people in the nude, including Beth Ann Fennelly.

Beth Ann Fennelly: Part of the point of them was that we weren't glamorized or made beautiful. You know, we're just very plain. You know, I was just facing the camera, you know, and it's experience — an experience in vulnerability. It's stepping outside of beauty culture. He was trying to get all body shapes and all ages. And I surprised myself by agreeing to do it. 

Chuck Reece: When Beth Ann visited us in Atlanta a couple years ago, she was considering allowing Salvation South to publish “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body” before it was included in her book, but ultimately she chose not to. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: Well, Salvation South has such a strong online presence that it occurred to me that anybody who was reading it online would immediately Google and try to find my portrait. And I just didn't feel like I could manage that. I just wanted someone to read the essay without looking at the portrait or feeling the need to look at the portrait. And I just feel like if it was online, it'd be too easy just to open up that search bar.

Chuck Reece: When I first finished my first read of The Irish Goodbye, I went looking for that two-year-old version of “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body” on my hard drive. And with the exception of the ending, the story that wound up in the book was completely different than the one I read two years ago. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: I live in a small town in the conservative rural South. And that made it all more complicated because I wasn't a New Yorker, an anonymous person. I knew that, you know, this series of 12 would be viewed by people in Oxford and they'd know exactly who I was. So I also was trying to think about Oxford as a community and what makes a community healthy. The reason why I'm interested in that is I think a lot about my town and what it means to be a neighbor. But I also see Oxford is changing. It's gotten very popular. A lot of people buy condos here. They just use them for six weekends a year. And the way that phrase, "the community fabric," you know, that's starting to happen increasingly in Oxford and our town is a little bit in jeopardy. A lot of the, you know, middle-class houses are torn down. The people who had lived middle-class lives are forced out. So I wanted to think, about these two things going together. One is my decision to pose for this painter and also talk a little bit about him and his background. And secondly, what it means to be in a beloved but beleaguered community that's important but is endangered. So the version I sent you quite some time ago had those two main essays kind of interwoven, but ultimately for the book, that piece was so long — it was close to 10,000 words and it kind of overwhelmed the rest of the collection, you know? Like, I have a piece in the book that's five words, so 10,000? You know, a little overwhelming. And also, I felt that maybe some of the stuff about Oxford, it's still important to me, but maybe it needs  to go someplace else. So I ended up kinda trying to simplify the focus of the essay just to be more about vulnerability and recognition and move out some of the stuff that I had in there about what it means to be in a healthy community and how we define a healthy community. 

Chuck Reece: When I saw the final version that landed as the ending of the book, here is what I took from it: Here is this woman who happens to be a friend of mine and who has gone through a very rough period in life — and has clearly not given up on the joy of living. It felt like a very optimistic way to end the book. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: I think that there's a way that that piece is acknowledging that the pain and the suffering that we have undergone helped to make us who we are and only by, you know, accepting those parts of our lives can we kind of be comfortable in our own skin, I guess.

Chuck Reece: Like many people who will read The Irish Goodbye, I have lost both my parents. Both times, the story was painful. But I love my friend Beth Ann’s book because even though I took solace from the thing that always gives us solace — the knowledge that we are not alone in our suffering — I also found myself being nourished by her words. There’s a subsection of “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body” with the subtitle, "Why I Eventually Posed." I want to read No. 4 from that list. And I quote.

Well now, I happen to have an imperfect body. It’s right here, under my dress. And if I rail against an ethos that obsesses over youth - if I detest the cultural pressure to lift, tuck, plump, inject, and laser - if I reject the mandate to needle botulism between my brows to erase my “thinkle” - if I believe that one way we could reduce this pressure to conform to an impossible ideal would be to see bodies of all shapes, sizes, colors, and levels of ability represented without shame, should I not then offer the one imperfect body that’s mine to offer? If I hate that middle-aged women are looked through, should I not then offer one to be looked at? (I dare you to look through my portrait by the way. First, I’m seven feet tall. Second, I'm framed in fluorescent pink.

Close quote.

Later in the essay, Beth Ann talks to, Rob Townsend, the artist, about what his intentions were with the painting. And he told her that what he wanted to get at was this question, "What makes us human?" Let me quote from Beth Ann’s essay one more time.

Maybe perceiving each other’s humanity makes us human. Recognizing ourselves in each other. Acknowledging our collaboration in the great human experiment. When confronting my own portrait, I become more human to myself. I am so clearly visible. What would be the point, now, in masquerading as another, or as a perfected version of myself? Isn’t that the lesson of Helen’s radical self-acceptance? It’s too late for avoidant poses and diffused light to distract, correct, or erase. I’m reminded that at all times - not just while confronting my portrait - I am nakedly human, flawed and alive. To prove it, I went on the record. For this one bright brief moment on planet Earth, framed in fluorescent pink, I was alive. 

Close quote.

I asked her what she hoped readers would feel when they put down her book The Irish Goodbye. 

Beth Ann Fennelly: I want them to feel to have a sense that they've gone through a journey that allowed them access to different emotions that we don't often have access to.

I think we turn to books to feel more. I think we live in a world that actually only kind of shoots us in certain directions, like "confirm purchase," "yes or no." That feeling is something that's offered to us all day long. I don't think we often get to think about vulnerability. I don't think we get to press into areas of shame. I don't think we're encouraged to think about revising our thinking about ourselves, our events.

I would like it if someone who read my book ended up feeling that they had felt all the feels, like the kids say. You know, maybe that they were surprised, maybe that they were made uncomfortable. And in addition, that they felt a sense of joy at certain places or they laughed and maybe they felt sad or had memories of their own life. That would be my goal.

Chuck Reece: I believe that loss becomes less painful when we begin to see what the person we lost, the person we mourn, actually left us with. What we would have missed, for example, without Beth Ann’s mother-in-law, Betty Franklin.

“When people talk about legacies, they usually mean buildings or civic projects or financial gifts. Betty’s legacy is love. Her legacy is children who experienced it purely. Her legacy is the man I wed. Her legacy is my happy marriage. 

She died of complications due to the Alzheimer’s that developed in her last years, though I’ve always believed she commenced her dying on February 16, 2016, the day her husband of almost sixty years died.  She took care of him from when he was in his twenties until he passed at eighty-two, and toward the end, when his health was in decline, his body failing part by part, that carework became full time. When he was gone, she lost her job. 

I never heard her complain until the end of her life, when Alzheimer’s started damaging her neural circuitry like rats nibbling the wiring in a house, invisible, insidious, the lights in her beautiful mind going out one by one. Before the diagnosis, but after we’d noticed worrying signs, we drove to her house to take her to a neurologist. We fetched lunch from Panera for all the grandkids, and Betty put her broccoli and cheddar soup in the fridge for later.

On the drive back from the tests, we heard her murmur something. “What, Mama?” Tommy asked. “I sure hope those kids don’t eat my soup,” she repeated. Tommy’s eyes met mine in the rearview. We didn’t need the neurologist to tell us she was sick. It was the meanest thing I’d heard her say in her entire life.

I lost a friend to cancer, and I used to think that was the worst death, to retain all of your faculties yet be unable to stop the body’s vicious revolt. Yet now that I’ve seen a death from Alzheimer’s, I’m not so sure. The slow, relentless, inexorable coring of someone’s personality, the deletions of memories, experiences, words, thoughts; this may in fact be worse. At the end, she couldn’t always recognize her children. There was so little left of her, but goodness remained. One of the last things she said to me was, “Can I fix you something?”

Hear that, Betty? It’s the log trucks. You can sleep now, sugar. You can sleep.”

You’ve been listening to Salvation South Deluxe, and we have some folks we need to thank. The first, of course, is Miz Beth Ann Fennelly, who is one of our region’s greatest living writers. We so appreciate the time she gave us to discuss The Irish Goodbye. Thanks also to the friends of Salvation South with whom we gather when we visit Oxford, Miss., John T. Edge, Blair Hobbs, Beth Ann's husband Tom Franklin, Michael Farris Smith, and others who are members of that little city’s amazingly talented community of writers.

Salvation South’s podcast now has a new producer, Miranda Hawkins, who has just joined Georgia Public Broadcasting to produce this show and do many other things for GPB. This is Miranda’s first show with us, and I can’t wait to see what we will cook up together in future episodes. Miranda works alongside Jeremy Powell, Georgia Public Broadcasting’s director of podcasts, who produced the previous two episodes of Salvation South Deluxe. I also want to thank Sandy Malcolm and Bert Wesley Huffman at GPB for their ongoing support of what we do at Salvation South.

You've been listening to Salvation South Deluxe, produced in cooperation with Georgia Public Broadcasting and its network of stations around our state. You can find us at SalvationSouth.com, where every Sunday, we bring you a new weekly edition of the South’s finest writing.

I'm Chuck Reece. We'll be back next month with another Deluxe look at the American South. Until then, try looking for the good in people and not the bad.