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 many 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, especially as fantasy and sci-fi currently has a stranglehold on the literary community. Phillips takes this to heart and lets readers 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 of language and a knack for bringing readers into the conversation, as if she is telling a good campfire story to assembled friends. 

SMALL TOWN GIRLS is never mean-spirited but always truthful about how women in small towns who were slated to stay home and beget another generation found a way out thanks to their intellectual prowess, grand imaginations and endless curiosity. Jayne Anne Phillips weaves the kind of totally American story that readers will find easy to love.