Editorial Content for Small Town Girls: a writer's memoir
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
Jayne Anne Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for NIGHT WATCH, her hard-edged novel about mental health care. This year, she has moved to a gentler subject for her memoir, SMALL TOWN GIRLS.
In 22 vignettes, Phillips paints a soulful portrait of a young woman growing up in Appalachia in the 20th century. The book features some famous history of the area (including the Hatfield–McCoy feud) and a lot of beautifully crafted stories about growing up in small-town West Virginia, along with the requisite rights and eventual wrongs of her country girl training as she cast a wide net and reined in the first inkling of the woman she would become.
"In 22 vignettes, Phillips paints a soulful portrait of a young woman growing up in Appalachia in the 20th century.... [She] weaves the kind of totally American story that readers will find easy to love."
“I know now that I loved my hometown, that its long history and layered stories provided the perfect birthplace for a writer… Despite the sometimes-doubtful economy, no one wanted to leave, or so it seemed to me as a child.” The families Phillips writes about, mostly her own (and her particular closeness to her mother), support her statement: generations of people were attached to that financially poor but culturally rich area of the country. She grows up in the midst of all of this history, and it comes to bear quite intensely in her life.
Writers are often taught to “write what they know,” which sometimes can be limiting, certainly in this day of fantasy and sci-fi taking a stronghold on the literary community. Phillips takes this to heart and lets the reader in on some of the most homespun and delightful tales of a young family living just to the right of center in a changing world.
Then Phillips writes a chapter about Stephen Crane, and everything shifts for her. Literature is the jet fuel that propels her into the wide world beyond. It certainly is de rigueur to ask artists about their inspirations and what book/film/painting brought them into the light of a more worldly culture. Rarely do we get to hear the full reason why.
Phillips takes the bandwidth that she has here to write a paean to Crane’s MAGGIE: A Girl of the Streets, which is now a forgotten American classic but opens up a new part of her brain. This portion of the book reflects her move beyond her ancestors, attending college and graduate school away from West Virginia, and finding a home outside the mountains that birthed her. But the history followed her as she moved into the greater world.
Crane’s story reflects some of Phillips’ adventuresome bravado and raises SMALL TOWN GIRLS from a pastoral memoir to a book that really traces the emotional and intellectual growth of a girl who strove to break through the barriers of her gender and upbringing to become a shining voice in the American literary landscape.
Like fellow Appalachian historian Barbara Kingsolver, Phillips shows the full range of her literary skills in even the simplest of stories. Whether writing about dogs or the TV show “The Big Valley,” she has a charming but astute grasp on language and a knack for bringing the reader right in next to her as if she is telling a good campfire story to assembled friends.
SMALL TOWN GIRLS is never mean-spirited but always truthful about how small-town life cannot hold the growing awareness of the global community in women who were slated to stay home and beget another generation but found a way out by their intellectual prowess, grand imaginations and questioning intellects. Jayne Anne Phillips weaves the kind of totally American story that readers will find easy to love.
Teaser
Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. In these pieces, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties between the women of the town. She traces her journeys across the country and her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation, offering insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield–McCoy feud, Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.
Promo
Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places. In these pieces, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties between the women of the town. She traces her journeys across the country and her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation, offering insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield–McCoy feud, Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.
About the Book
A luminous memoir in essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory.
“The painful thing about adolescence is that everything seems absolute, and the painful thing about adulthood is that nothing does.”
Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia --- dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings --- has been the great setting for her fiction, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled to other times and places.
In these pieces, and in her inimitable first-person voice, at once intimate and wide-ranging, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties between the women of the town. She traces her journey across the country in search of love and work and belonging --- her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation --- and offers insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her.
From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield–McCoy feud, from Jean Shrimpton and Barbara Stanwyck to Stephen Crane and Breece D'J Pancake, Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.
Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and open-heartedness, SMALL TOWN GIRLS is part coming-of-age story, part social history, Jayne Anne Phillips’ most personal, most accessible book yet --- a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
Audiobook available, read by Jayne Anne Phillips
