Small Town Girls
a writer's memoir
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 21, 2026
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
OPRAH'S #1 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 • A luminous memoir in essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory.
"Small Town Girls is a brilliant, wide-ranging book, nostalgic and tough-minded at the same time. Like Willa Cather and Stephen Crane, Jayne Anne Phillips writes prose that reads like plainspoken poetry, full of startling and vivid images that bring a vanished world back to life before our eyes." —Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers
“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 singular first-person voice, at once intimate and wide-ranging, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She re-creates 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, 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’s most personal, most accessible book yet—a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winning novelist Phillips (Night Watch) takes a lyrical look at her West Virginia upbringing in this wonderful memoir-in-essays. Born in 1952 in the small college and mining town of Buckhannon, Phillips muses that the area's "long history and layered stories provided the perfect birthplace for a writer." In "Premature Burial," she juxtaposes the world of the movies, where life is "more the way should be," with the "grinding, entrenched poverty" in early 1960s Buckhannon. In "Outlaw Heart," she ponders the distance between her mother, who longed to leave the town, and her resentful father. Elsewhere, Phillips reflects on important touchstones in her early life ("On Not Having a Daughter" details the abortion she underwent at age 20), and nods to her literary inspirations, including Red Badge of Courage author Stephen Crane, who portrayed the " ‘familiar and low' as lives that formed and commented on America as it truly was," and fellow West Virginian Breece D'J Pancake, who sketched the "loss and wrenching cruelty" of life in Appalachia. Equal parts wistful and pragmatic, Phillips's autopsy of rural mid-century America doubles as a haunting and insightful self-portrait. Even readers unfamiliar with the author's fiction will be riveted.
