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Small Town Girls: A Writer's Memoir
A luminous memoir in essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory.
“Understand: born and raised in West Virginia, you can never truly leave. Those who stay, and those who don’t, stand in the middle of the story, wherever they go.”
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’s most personal, most accessible book yet—a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
“Understand: born and raised in West Virginia, you can never truly leave. Those who stay, and those who don’t, stand in the middle of the story, wherever they go.”
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’s most personal, most accessible book yet—a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published April 21, 2026
91 people are currently reading
4918 people want to read
About the author
Jayne Anne Phillips
55 books768 followersJAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
January 29, 2026
Small Town Girls: A Writer's Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips. This memoir is very well written, with vivid details and various stories of this small West Virginia town. However, I thought this would feel more cohesive, and tell more of Phillips story being a girl growing up in a small town (hence the title). It felt as if it flowed at first providing a back story and different moments in the authors life. There was a brief introduction to family members and the community at large. Somewhere midway through it felt like it was just a compilation of stories put together. It no longer seemed like a memoir which was a bit disappointing.
Thank you to the publisher for the advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.
Thank you to the publisher for the advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.
April 21, 2026
The Beauty Shop, the Burning Trees, and the Memoir That Knows Too Much
Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls” turns girlhood, gossip, religion, grief, and Appalachian history into a sharp, haunted education in attention.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 20th, 2026
The Room That Taught Her to See – a beauty-shop sink, a waiting child, and faint afterimages of church light, fire, sickroom, and smoke gather the hidden architecture of attention in Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls.”
A beauty shop promises to improve the head. In Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls: a writer’s memoir,” it does something more intimate and more consequential. It teaches a girl how women sound when men are absent. It teaches her that beauty can arrive as care and correction in the same breath. It teaches her that gossip, that supposedly minor art, may be the only unofficial ledger some lives ever receive. The women tilt back into the sinks; their bodies surrender; the talk moves around them like weather. A child sits nearby, allegedly waiting.
In truth, she is taking inventory.
At the sink, she begins to understand what women keep, trade, and disguise. It may look like a return-home memoir, but Buckhannon, West Virginia, is not merely the place Phillips revisits; it is the place that formed her eye, her fear, her silence. What follows is an inventory of sinks, pews, yards, theater seats, sickbeds, and graves. Each place marks her before she understands what has happened. Home, here, is not escaped by leaving. It keeps marking the body long after departure has begun.
Phillips opens by treating “hometown” not as an address-book fact but as a spell with obligations attached. Buckhannon arrives through Main Street, newspapers, comic books, house calls, cemeteries, cornfields, churches, parades, local doctors, the Pringle Tree, and the gold dome of the courthouse. It also arrives through her parents: a mother who carries the town’s memory in her bones; a father whose territory is concrete, machines, boundaries, and work. There are family legends and family omissions: Civil War division, illness, abandonment, death, endurance.
The town is not scenery. It is Phillips’s first apprenticeship in attention. Before she can become the novelist who writes the past so vividly, she has to become the child who notices where the light falls, who knows the smell of sawdust in the bookstore, who learns that local history and family history are not two braided strands but one rope, already around the wrist.
The opening essays show Phillips’s gifts before the book names them. In “Report of the Spies,” the child Phillips attends Methodist Bible school and is overwhelmed by organ music, stained glass, communion language, and the story of Jesus welcoming children. She has a strange bodily shock in the sanctuary, then faints during the basement party afterward, her white organdy dress ruined by Coke and ice. Later, under Reverend Snow, she gives a Sunday school report on the biblical spies sent into Canaan and quietly questions the morality of chosen people taking land from others. The adult narrator refuses to press the scene into a tidy critique of religion. She keeps its weather intact: awe, shame, light in the eyes, the ruined dress, the minister’s kiss, the stained-glass oculus looking down like an eye. Doctrine is not received as belief. It enters as sensation.
The White Dress Under the Oculus – childhood awe, shame, and bodily bewilderment collect beneath the church light, where belief enters Phillips’s memoir first as sensation rather than doctrine.
“Shop Talk” has the same two-handed intelligence. Phillips remembers accompanying her mother to the beauty shop, where she reads forbidden magazines, listens to women’s stories, watches bodies being washed and handled, and slowly grasps that femininity is work before it is identity. Her mother and the hairdresser study her face and hair, worry over her plainness, and cut her long hair into a humiliating pixie. The episode could settle into a familiar mother-daughter wound, but Phillips is after a less obedient truth. The beauty shop is double-edged: a school of judgment and a weekly refuge; a place where girls learn the cost of being presentable and women, for one afternoon, let someone else tend to them. The essay’s generosity does not erase the sting. It lets the sting and the care remain together: sink, chair, mirror, curlers.
In “Burning the Trees,” the father’s territory comes forward: the acre of land, the boundary fence, the yard, the brothers’ masculine kingdom of toy trucks, dirt roads, bows, arrows, tools, boots, fire. One brother accidentally shoots their father through the boot and ankle. Instead of rage, the father returns from the hospital and praises the boy’s arm. Later he burns caterpillar webs from the fruit trees with a kerosene torch while the children watch. Phillips lets the trees burn first. Only afterward does the image open: the father moving through flame, the little trees flaring, childhood fear brightening into dream, the dead returning through a scene too vivid to leave behind. Meaning comes afterward, smelling faintly of smoke.
Burning the Trees – a father moves through remembered fire with a kerosene torch, turning a childhood yard into one of “Small Town Girls”’s most vivid images of fear, tenderness, and afterimage.
After these first rooms, the state’s older violences come in with muddy shoes. “Small Town Girls” is made of 22 titled essays rather than formal parts, and Phillips lets the sequence move by echo rather than blueprint. “Paradise Lost: West Virginia” carries the book from natural abundance into settlement, timber, coal, mountaintop removal, fracking, and family inheritance. “Lovelorn Labors: The Hatfield’s and McCoy’s” recasts a caricatured feud as a story of land, scarcity, pride, law, timber, and opportunism. “A Small History” narrows again to a neglected boy near Phillips’s rural road, seen by adults who can register the damage but not fully save him. Dogs, television westerns, fashion magazines, school violence, abortion, child death, literary ancestors, caregiving, and horror cinema all enter the house.
The memoir fills up – thrillingly, then sometimes until the air thins. A stained-glass window, a sink, a father’s punctured boot, a butter plate, a dog’s body, a red Jaguar, a movie seat, a bed, a crematorium: each waits to flare. The past knocks at the same doors until Phillips answers in sentences.
Images arrive before explanation. Phillips writes by gathering, not snapping shut. Her rhythm is cumulative, sensory, often tidal. She begins with domestic nouns with long fuses – hair rollers, fruit trees, boots, butter, dogs, caskets – and lets them absorb pressure until fact begins to glow. Her diction is not ornate in the manner of a writer dressing the sentence for company. It is dense because the remembered world is thick with stored feeling. The smell of a beauty shop, the hush of a doctor’s stairwell, the organ shaking a child’s bones, the waiting body of a dog, the theatrical white of funeral flowers: Phillips writes as if every object has been steeping for decades.
A saving mischief keeps the book from embalming itself. Phillips can be reverent, but she is rarely solemn in the dull way. She understands the comedy of women managing appearances, the absurdity of a red Jaguar meant to turn middle-aged mothers into temporary outlaws, the heroic inconvenience of looking “natural,” which women might well have unionized if they had not been so busy setting their hair. Without that agility, elegy would harden into perfume. Instead, even the lace curtains have a little dirt on them. Good. A perfectly clean memoir is a suspicious object.
Comparisons help here only when kept close. Like Lee Smith’s “Dimestore: A Writer’s Life,” Phillips’s memoir returns to a small-town Appalachian and Southern childhood to recover the making of a writer. Like Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood,” it is fascinated by perception before explanation. Like Rebecca Solnit’s “The Faraway Nearby,” it trusts association, recurrence, and the braided essay more than direct chronology. But Phillips is less companionable than Smith, less metaphysical than Dillard, less conceptual than Solnit. Her truest mode is gothic domestic witness: she is interested in what the room knew before the child did.
Phillips makes home less a place than a set of trained reflexes: how to look, what to fear, whom to overhear, when to keep still. West Virginia is not a backdrop lacquered in melancholy. It is a place lodged in the nerves: beautiful, exploited, misunderstood, beloved, historically burdened, impossible to leave in any simple way. “Paradise Lost: West Virginia” makes the injury explicit – timber, coal, mountaintop removal, fracking – but Phillips is sharpest when coal seams and kitchen drawers are understood as part of the same bequest. The land is not “context” for the family. The family is one of the ways the land enters history. The beauty shop is not quaint local color. It is a ledger of womanly bargain and warning.
Coal Seams and Kitchen Drawers – household memory and West Virginia’s scarred inheritance meet in one quiet interior, where coal, family, and place become part of the same bequest.
Caregiving gives the book its hardest evidence. In “Taking Care” and “Premature Burial,” Phillips’s mother, vivid throughout as teacher, keeper, critic, worrier, worker, and beloved burden, becomes terminally ill with lung cancer. The daughter becomes caretaker while pregnant and then mothering an infant, building a household around decline, medication, bedside reading, and the daily arithmetic of pain. These scenes are mercifully unsweetened. Care is made of love, impatience, logistics, guilt, tenderness, dread, and the sickening knowledge that devotion cannot make anyone safe. This is witness without rescue: she can tend, but she cannot save.
The Bedside Arithmetic – a lamp, chair, book, blanket, and pill bottle hold the unsentimental labor of caregiving, where love becomes witness without rescue.
“Premature Burial” is the right ending because it does not simply close the book; it turns the key on everything before it. Phillips returns to childhood moviegoing, to Roger Corman’s “Premature Burial,” to the terror of bodies trapped alive, to poverty up the rural roads, to sexual threat at the theater, to family rage, to the mother’s suffering, and finally to the crematorium. She watches the smoke of her mother’s body rise into winter fog. Earlier in life, she had imagined escape and redemption as paired possibilities. By the end, departure has lost its glamour. Redemption, if the word can still be used without false consolation, is the circling back: the writer’s attempt to preserve what was emotionally real before shame, silence, and the ordinary vandalism of time can bury it.
Smoke After the Theater – empty movie seats and rising smoke join childhood fear, mother-loss, and final return, carrying the memoir’s closing movement from escape into witness.
The book’s open-handed structure gives it range, but a few chambers have light without pressure. Phillips’s arrangement depends on recurrence, yet recurrence does not always change the voltage. Home, mother, writing, watching: these are powerful enough to carry the memoir, but they return so often that a few essays feel less like fresh revelations than beautifully lit side rooms. The literary tributes to Crane and Pancake are intelligent and affectionate, but they ask the reader to follow Phillips outward into ancestry and influence rather than deeper into the book’s most volatile domestic core. The Hatfield-McCoy essay and the school-shooting chapter have moral seriousness, but at moments they arrive wearing the badge of their first occasion instead of bending fully into the memoir’s final arc. The house is large. Not every room contains the ghost we came to meet.
The flaw is a draft, not a fault line. Phillips’s prose keeps its pulse even when the form loosens, and the last essays send a clarifying current backward through the earlier ones. A stricter book might have been more concentrated. It might also have been less true to the unruly way the past arrives: bringing relatives, dogs, weather, old movies, bad haircuts, dead writers, local legends, church music, and some unnecessary luggage. Phillips keeps inviting recollection in, and recollection, being recollection, does not always wipe its shoes.
My final rating is 86/100, which translates to 4/5 stars.
What prevents “Small Town Girls” from becoming a handsome recollection is its understanding that the past is not innocent. To remember home is also to remember class shame, gender discipline, religious pressure, environmental ruin, bodies mishandled by illness and desire, children unprotected, women overburdened, and mothers both adored and impossible. Phillips does not pretend that art makes every wound useful. She is too honest for that little seminar lie. What she does suggest is more severe: writing can keep faith with what happened by refusing to make love simpler than it was.
The book has no patience for the souvenir version of the past. It does not set Buckhannon under glass. It lets the town breathe, gossip, embarrass, decay, shine, and accuse. Phillips returns to the old rooms not to restore them but to hear what they were saying all along. The title may sound modest, almost communal, but the memoir itself is haunted by the girls contained in it: those who stayed, those who left, those who died young, those made beautiful against their will, those entrusted with secrets too early, and one who became a writer because some rooms were too alive to leave vacant.
The final image that lingers is not only the smoke at the crematorium, though that is where grief stops being atmosphere and becomes body. It is the child before that: in the church, in the beauty shop, in the yard, in the theater, watching. She does not yet know that attention can become a vocation. She does not yet know that escape will fail. She knows only that something has happened in the room, and that no one else seems likely to say exactly what. Decades later, Phillips returns sentence by sentence. What remains is the light, the smoke, the gossip, the organ music, the mother’s voice, and the burning trees.
Compositional Thumbnail Sheet – early graphite studies test the placement of sink, child, mirror, and negative space before the final watercolor finds its quiet room of witness.
Faint Pencil Underdrawing – the first skeletal lines establish the sink, chair, waiting child, and memory-panel before color begins to make the room breathe.
Character Posture Study – small seated-figure studies search for the child’s watchfulness through shoulders, hands, and stillness rather than facial expression.
Color Swatch Sheet – muted cream, taupe, charcoal, blush, brick red, and deep crimson tests keep the painting bound to the cover’s restrained memory palette.
Pencil-Plus-First-Wash Stage – the room begins to emerge in pale gray, taupe, and cream washes, with the first red accents suggesting memory before meaning.
Mirror / Memory-Panel Study – faint washes of oculus, flame, bedside lamp, and smoke test how much symbolism the back wall can hold without becoming a literal montage.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls” turns girlhood, gossip, religion, grief, and Appalachian history into a sharp, haunted education in attention.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 20th, 2026
The Room That Taught Her to See – a beauty-shop sink, a waiting child, and faint afterimages of church light, fire, sickroom, and smoke gather the hidden architecture of attention in Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls.”
A beauty shop promises to improve the head. In Jayne Anne Phillips’s “Small Town Girls: a writer’s memoir,” it does something more intimate and more consequential. It teaches a girl how women sound when men are absent. It teaches her that beauty can arrive as care and correction in the same breath. It teaches her that gossip, that supposedly minor art, may be the only unofficial ledger some lives ever receive. The women tilt back into the sinks; their bodies surrender; the talk moves around them like weather. A child sits nearby, allegedly waiting.
In truth, she is taking inventory.
At the sink, she begins to understand what women keep, trade, and disguise. It may look like a return-home memoir, but Buckhannon, West Virginia, is not merely the place Phillips revisits; it is the place that formed her eye, her fear, her silence. What follows is an inventory of sinks, pews, yards, theater seats, sickbeds, and graves. Each place marks her before she understands what has happened. Home, here, is not escaped by leaving. It keeps marking the body long after departure has begun.
Phillips opens by treating “hometown” not as an address-book fact but as a spell with obligations attached. Buckhannon arrives through Main Street, newspapers, comic books, house calls, cemeteries, cornfields, churches, parades, local doctors, the Pringle Tree, and the gold dome of the courthouse. It also arrives through her parents: a mother who carries the town’s memory in her bones; a father whose territory is concrete, machines, boundaries, and work. There are family legends and family omissions: Civil War division, illness, abandonment, death, endurance.
The town is not scenery. It is Phillips’s first apprenticeship in attention. Before she can become the novelist who writes the past so vividly, she has to become the child who notices where the light falls, who knows the smell of sawdust in the bookstore, who learns that local history and family history are not two braided strands but one rope, already around the wrist.
The opening essays show Phillips’s gifts before the book names them. In “Report of the Spies,” the child Phillips attends Methodist Bible school and is overwhelmed by organ music, stained glass, communion language, and the story of Jesus welcoming children. She has a strange bodily shock in the sanctuary, then faints during the basement party afterward, her white organdy dress ruined by Coke and ice. Later, under Reverend Snow, she gives a Sunday school report on the biblical spies sent into Canaan and quietly questions the morality of chosen people taking land from others. The adult narrator refuses to press the scene into a tidy critique of religion. She keeps its weather intact: awe, shame, light in the eyes, the ruined dress, the minister’s kiss, the stained-glass oculus looking down like an eye. Doctrine is not received as belief. It enters as sensation.
The White Dress Under the Oculus – childhood awe, shame, and bodily bewilderment collect beneath the church light, where belief enters Phillips’s memoir first as sensation rather than doctrine.
“Shop Talk” has the same two-handed intelligence. Phillips remembers accompanying her mother to the beauty shop, where she reads forbidden magazines, listens to women’s stories, watches bodies being washed and handled, and slowly grasps that femininity is work before it is identity. Her mother and the hairdresser study her face and hair, worry over her plainness, and cut her long hair into a humiliating pixie. The episode could settle into a familiar mother-daughter wound, but Phillips is after a less obedient truth. The beauty shop is double-edged: a school of judgment and a weekly refuge; a place where girls learn the cost of being presentable and women, for one afternoon, let someone else tend to them. The essay’s generosity does not erase the sting. It lets the sting and the care remain together: sink, chair, mirror, curlers.
In “Burning the Trees,” the father’s territory comes forward: the acre of land, the boundary fence, the yard, the brothers’ masculine kingdom of toy trucks, dirt roads, bows, arrows, tools, boots, fire. One brother accidentally shoots their father through the boot and ankle. Instead of rage, the father returns from the hospital and praises the boy’s arm. Later he burns caterpillar webs from the fruit trees with a kerosene torch while the children watch. Phillips lets the trees burn first. Only afterward does the image open: the father moving through flame, the little trees flaring, childhood fear brightening into dream, the dead returning through a scene too vivid to leave behind. Meaning comes afterward, smelling faintly of smoke.
Burning the Trees – a father moves through remembered fire with a kerosene torch, turning a childhood yard into one of “Small Town Girls”’s most vivid images of fear, tenderness, and afterimage.
After these first rooms, the state’s older violences come in with muddy shoes. “Small Town Girls” is made of 22 titled essays rather than formal parts, and Phillips lets the sequence move by echo rather than blueprint. “Paradise Lost: West Virginia” carries the book from natural abundance into settlement, timber, coal, mountaintop removal, fracking, and family inheritance. “Lovelorn Labors: The Hatfield’s and McCoy’s” recasts a caricatured feud as a story of land, scarcity, pride, law, timber, and opportunism. “A Small History” narrows again to a neglected boy near Phillips’s rural road, seen by adults who can register the damage but not fully save him. Dogs, television westerns, fashion magazines, school violence, abortion, child death, literary ancestors, caregiving, and horror cinema all enter the house.
The memoir fills up – thrillingly, then sometimes until the air thins. A stained-glass window, a sink, a father’s punctured boot, a butter plate, a dog’s body, a red Jaguar, a movie seat, a bed, a crematorium: each waits to flare. The past knocks at the same doors until Phillips answers in sentences.
Images arrive before explanation. Phillips writes by gathering, not snapping shut. Her rhythm is cumulative, sensory, often tidal. She begins with domestic nouns with long fuses – hair rollers, fruit trees, boots, butter, dogs, caskets – and lets them absorb pressure until fact begins to glow. Her diction is not ornate in the manner of a writer dressing the sentence for company. It is dense because the remembered world is thick with stored feeling. The smell of a beauty shop, the hush of a doctor’s stairwell, the organ shaking a child’s bones, the waiting body of a dog, the theatrical white of funeral flowers: Phillips writes as if every object has been steeping for decades.
A saving mischief keeps the book from embalming itself. Phillips can be reverent, but she is rarely solemn in the dull way. She understands the comedy of women managing appearances, the absurdity of a red Jaguar meant to turn middle-aged mothers into temporary outlaws, the heroic inconvenience of looking “natural,” which women might well have unionized if they had not been so busy setting their hair. Without that agility, elegy would harden into perfume. Instead, even the lace curtains have a little dirt on them. Good. A perfectly clean memoir is a suspicious object.
Comparisons help here only when kept close. Like Lee Smith’s “Dimestore: A Writer’s Life,” Phillips’s memoir returns to a small-town Appalachian and Southern childhood to recover the making of a writer. Like Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood,” it is fascinated by perception before explanation. Like Rebecca Solnit’s “The Faraway Nearby,” it trusts association, recurrence, and the braided essay more than direct chronology. But Phillips is less companionable than Smith, less metaphysical than Dillard, less conceptual than Solnit. Her truest mode is gothic domestic witness: she is interested in what the room knew before the child did.
Phillips makes home less a place than a set of trained reflexes: how to look, what to fear, whom to overhear, when to keep still. West Virginia is not a backdrop lacquered in melancholy. It is a place lodged in the nerves: beautiful, exploited, misunderstood, beloved, historically burdened, impossible to leave in any simple way. “Paradise Lost: West Virginia” makes the injury explicit – timber, coal, mountaintop removal, fracking – but Phillips is sharpest when coal seams and kitchen drawers are understood as part of the same bequest. The land is not “context” for the family. The family is one of the ways the land enters history. The beauty shop is not quaint local color. It is a ledger of womanly bargain and warning.
Coal Seams and Kitchen Drawers – household memory and West Virginia’s scarred inheritance meet in one quiet interior, where coal, family, and place become part of the same bequest.
Caregiving gives the book its hardest evidence. In “Taking Care” and “Premature Burial,” Phillips’s mother, vivid throughout as teacher, keeper, critic, worrier, worker, and beloved burden, becomes terminally ill with lung cancer. The daughter becomes caretaker while pregnant and then mothering an infant, building a household around decline, medication, bedside reading, and the daily arithmetic of pain. These scenes are mercifully unsweetened. Care is made of love, impatience, logistics, guilt, tenderness, dread, and the sickening knowledge that devotion cannot make anyone safe. This is witness without rescue: she can tend, but she cannot save.
The Bedside Arithmetic – a lamp, chair, book, blanket, and pill bottle hold the unsentimental labor of caregiving, where love becomes witness without rescue.
“Premature Burial” is the right ending because it does not simply close the book; it turns the key on everything before it. Phillips returns to childhood moviegoing, to Roger Corman’s “Premature Burial,” to the terror of bodies trapped alive, to poverty up the rural roads, to sexual threat at the theater, to family rage, to the mother’s suffering, and finally to the crematorium. She watches the smoke of her mother’s body rise into winter fog. Earlier in life, she had imagined escape and redemption as paired possibilities. By the end, departure has lost its glamour. Redemption, if the word can still be used without false consolation, is the circling back: the writer’s attempt to preserve what was emotionally real before shame, silence, and the ordinary vandalism of time can bury it.
Smoke After the Theater – empty movie seats and rising smoke join childhood fear, mother-loss, and final return, carrying the memoir’s closing movement from escape into witness.
The book’s open-handed structure gives it range, but a few chambers have light without pressure. Phillips’s arrangement depends on recurrence, yet recurrence does not always change the voltage. Home, mother, writing, watching: these are powerful enough to carry the memoir, but they return so often that a few essays feel less like fresh revelations than beautifully lit side rooms. The literary tributes to Crane and Pancake are intelligent and affectionate, but they ask the reader to follow Phillips outward into ancestry and influence rather than deeper into the book’s most volatile domestic core. The Hatfield-McCoy essay and the school-shooting chapter have moral seriousness, but at moments they arrive wearing the badge of their first occasion instead of bending fully into the memoir’s final arc. The house is large. Not every room contains the ghost we came to meet.
The flaw is a draft, not a fault line. Phillips’s prose keeps its pulse even when the form loosens, and the last essays send a clarifying current backward through the earlier ones. A stricter book might have been more concentrated. It might also have been less true to the unruly way the past arrives: bringing relatives, dogs, weather, old movies, bad haircuts, dead writers, local legends, church music, and some unnecessary luggage. Phillips keeps inviting recollection in, and recollection, being recollection, does not always wipe its shoes.
My final rating is 86/100, which translates to 4/5 stars.
What prevents “Small Town Girls” from becoming a handsome recollection is its understanding that the past is not innocent. To remember home is also to remember class shame, gender discipline, religious pressure, environmental ruin, bodies mishandled by illness and desire, children unprotected, women overburdened, and mothers both adored and impossible. Phillips does not pretend that art makes every wound useful. She is too honest for that little seminar lie. What she does suggest is more severe: writing can keep faith with what happened by refusing to make love simpler than it was.
The book has no patience for the souvenir version of the past. It does not set Buckhannon under glass. It lets the town breathe, gossip, embarrass, decay, shine, and accuse. Phillips returns to the old rooms not to restore them but to hear what they were saying all along. The title may sound modest, almost communal, but the memoir itself is haunted by the girls contained in it: those who stayed, those who left, those who died young, those made beautiful against their will, those entrusted with secrets too early, and one who became a writer because some rooms were too alive to leave vacant.
The final image that lingers is not only the smoke at the crematorium, though that is where grief stops being atmosphere and becomes body. It is the child before that: in the church, in the beauty shop, in the yard, in the theater, watching. She does not yet know that attention can become a vocation. She does not yet know that escape will fail. She knows only that something has happened in the room, and that no one else seems likely to say exactly what. Decades later, Phillips returns sentence by sentence. What remains is the light, the smoke, the gossip, the organ music, the mother’s voice, and the burning trees.
Compositional Thumbnail Sheet – early graphite studies test the placement of sink, child, mirror, and negative space before the final watercolor finds its quiet room of witness.
Faint Pencil Underdrawing – the first skeletal lines establish the sink, chair, waiting child, and memory-panel before color begins to make the room breathe.
Character Posture Study – small seated-figure studies search for the child’s watchfulness through shoulders, hands, and stillness rather than facial expression.
Color Swatch Sheet – muted cream, taupe, charcoal, blush, brick red, and deep crimson tests keep the painting bound to the cover’s restrained memory palette.
Pencil-Plus-First-Wash Stage – the room begins to emerge in pale gray, taupe, and cream washes, with the first red accents suggesting memory before meaning.
Mirror / Memory-Panel Study – faint washes of oculus, flame, bedside lamp, and smoke test how much symbolism the back wall can hold without becoming a literal montage.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
April 24, 2026
After just a few minutes of listening to the audio, I determined I need to seek out all of Jayne Anne Phillips' books. I absolutely loved her writing! She has a descriptive, poetic prose that is equally as lovely as her thoughtful observations and memories. For those reasons, I really enjoyed much of this "writer's memoir."
I felt most connected to the sections focused on her childhood, personal experiences, recollections of growing up with incredible descriptions of her hometown, and to the relationship with her mother and the grief of losing her.
The drawback of this book for me was the essay structure. I would have preferred a more linear memoir that went even deeper. While some of the essays about writers who influenced her life were interesting at times, they sometimes lost me especially while listening to the audio.
Overall, I loved Phillips' writing so much that I feel I have found a new favorite writer.
I felt most connected to the sections focused on her childhood, personal experiences, recollections of growing up with incredible descriptions of her hometown, and to the relationship with her mother and the grief of losing her.
The drawback of this book for me was the essay structure. I would have preferred a more linear memoir that went even deeper. While some of the essays about writers who influenced her life were interesting at times, they sometimes lost me especially while listening to the audio.
Overall, I loved Phillips' writing so much that I feel I have found a new favorite writer.
April 8, 2026
3.5 stars
April 30, 2026
A smidge over three. Some stories did not work for me, and seemed out of place in a book that is supposed to be a memoir or about a small town in West Virginia. Why did we have to read about the Hatfields and McCoys? I’m not sure the point to be made was worth it, since these types of chapters pulled me out of becoming immersed in the book.
April 23, 2026
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Thank you to NetGalley for the ebook and Knopf for the physical copy.
📝 Short Summary
This book is a collection of essays that reflects on Jayne Anne Phillips’s roots, the place she came from, and the people and experiences that shaped her as a writer. It is less of a straightforward memoir and more of a reflective look at memory, place, and identity.
Review
Going into this, I was expecting more of a memoir, but this definitely felt more like a collection of essays. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it changed the way I connected to the book. Some of the essays really worked for me, while others felt a little more distant, so overall this landed at more of a 3.5 star read for me, rounded up to 4.
What I did appreciate most was how clearly the author was able to show readers where she came from. There is a strong sense of place throughout this book, and you can tell how much her upbringing, her hometown, and the landscape around her shaped not only her life, but also her writing. That part felt very vivid. Even when I was not fully locked into every essay, I could still feel the atmosphere and the importance of that setting in her life.
There is also a reflective, thoughtful quality to the writing that makes it clear this book is deeply personal, even if it does not always read like a traditional memoir. It feels more impressionistic at times, more concerned with memory and feeling than with telling one continuous life story. I think that will really work for some readers, especially those who enjoy essay collections and literary reflections on writing, place, and identity.
For me, the strongest parts were the essays where I felt more grounded in her personal experiences and her connection to home. Those moments had more emotional pull and made me feel more invested. Other sections were a little harder for me to fully connect with, which is why this was not a total standout read for me, even though I still found a lot to appreciate in it.
This is a quieter book, one that feels more reflective than emotionally immediate, and I think that is worth knowing going in. It is not the kind of memoir that pulls you through one big personal narrative. It is more layered, more observational, and more focused on pieces of a life than a full continuous arc.
Overall, I did enjoy parts of this, especially the way the author brought her upbringing and surroundings to life. Even though not every essay fully landed for me, there was still enough here that I appreciated, and I can definitely see this connecting with readers who enjoy literary nonfiction and essay driven memoirs.
✅ Would I Recommend It?
Yes, but mostly to readers who enjoy essay collections, reflective nonfiction, and books that are more about place, memory, and identity than a traditional memoir structure.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ebook and Knopf for the physical copy.
📝 Short Summary
This book is a collection of essays that reflects on Jayne Anne Phillips’s roots, the place she came from, and the people and experiences that shaped her as a writer. It is less of a straightforward memoir and more of a reflective look at memory, place, and identity.
Review
Going into this, I was expecting more of a memoir, but this definitely felt more like a collection of essays. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it changed the way I connected to the book. Some of the essays really worked for me, while others felt a little more distant, so overall this landed at more of a 3.5 star read for me, rounded up to 4.
What I did appreciate most was how clearly the author was able to show readers where she came from. There is a strong sense of place throughout this book, and you can tell how much her upbringing, her hometown, and the landscape around her shaped not only her life, but also her writing. That part felt very vivid. Even when I was not fully locked into every essay, I could still feel the atmosphere and the importance of that setting in her life.
There is also a reflective, thoughtful quality to the writing that makes it clear this book is deeply personal, even if it does not always read like a traditional memoir. It feels more impressionistic at times, more concerned with memory and feeling than with telling one continuous life story. I think that will really work for some readers, especially those who enjoy essay collections and literary reflections on writing, place, and identity.
For me, the strongest parts were the essays where I felt more grounded in her personal experiences and her connection to home. Those moments had more emotional pull and made me feel more invested. Other sections were a little harder for me to fully connect with, which is why this was not a total standout read for me, even though I still found a lot to appreciate in it.
This is a quieter book, one that feels more reflective than emotionally immediate, and I think that is worth knowing going in. It is not the kind of memoir that pulls you through one big personal narrative. It is more layered, more observational, and more focused on pieces of a life than a full continuous arc.
Overall, I did enjoy parts of this, especially the way the author brought her upbringing and surroundings to life. Even though not every essay fully landed for me, there was still enough here that I appreciated, and I can definitely see this connecting with readers who enjoy literary nonfiction and essay driven memoirs.
✅ Would I Recommend It?
Yes, but mostly to readers who enjoy essay collections, reflective nonfiction, and books that are more about place, memory, and identity than a traditional memoir structure.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
THANK YOU to #NetGalley and #KnopfPublishing for this INCREDIBLE collection of essays by the singular Jayne Anne Phillips. I've learned so much about her over the course of reading these carefully curated pieces -- one of the most brilliant essay collections I've had the honor of reading).
I share some similarities with the author who hails from Buckhannon, WV. This collection was most definitely a tribute to her roots - town, family, culture, childhood, friends, and dogs (and so much more). I'm typing quickly and trying to tone down the gush of love and emotion I have for this entire collection. Not one essay failed to hold my attention and, even better, many of these nonfiction pieces informed and spotlit aspects of others who preceded (and followed) them! I went through the collection twice for that reason. I learned so much about the WV culture (including historical information) and the Phillips' family (especially Jayne Anne's mother).
I've seen that Phillips has been deemed a "writer's writer" and I can totally understand that sentiment (she describes the writing process and includes accounts of other writers -- from Stephen Crane to Breece D'J Pancake, her experiences at Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her complete joy for books and language. And the agony of a writer NOT being able to write. I am, to a degree, a writer (and I can feel those sentiments) but I'm blessed to be, primarily, a reader and adorer of great writing!! Jayne Anne Phillips delivers - over and over again.
Though I know it would probably be okay to add some quotes from certain essays (the collection is infinitely quotable), I don't want this POSITIVE REVIEW to be flagged as having spoilers by the eyes of AI algorithms so I will refrain from adding anything.
I LOVE THIS COLLECTION. Full Stop. I recommend it to absolutely everyone who loves great writing and the array of topics and subjects is bound to please just about everyone. It's a beautifully human and unifying book of essays and I love Jayne Anne Phillips (her editor, etc. who assisted in pulling this together) and for bringing it into existence. It's exactly what I needed in my life - in this bizarre and angry world -- and it has been an antidote and a lift to read and experience.. I give this memoir ALL THE STARS and then some.
I share some similarities with the author who hails from Buckhannon, WV. This collection was most definitely a tribute to her roots - town, family, culture, childhood, friends, and dogs (and so much more). I'm typing quickly and trying to tone down the gush of love and emotion I have for this entire collection. Not one essay failed to hold my attention and, even better, many of these nonfiction pieces informed and spotlit aspects of others who preceded (and followed) them! I went through the collection twice for that reason. I learned so much about the WV culture (including historical information) and the Phillips' family (especially Jayne Anne's mother).
I've seen that Phillips has been deemed a "writer's writer" and I can totally understand that sentiment (she describes the writing process and includes accounts of other writers -- from Stephen Crane to Breece D'J Pancake, her experiences at Iowa Writer's Workshop, and her complete joy for books and language. And the agony of a writer NOT being able to write. I am, to a degree, a writer (and I can feel those sentiments) but I'm blessed to be, primarily, a reader and adorer of great writing!! Jayne Anne Phillips delivers - over and over again.
Though I know it would probably be okay to add some quotes from certain essays (the collection is infinitely quotable), I don't want this POSITIVE REVIEW to be flagged as having spoilers by the eyes of AI algorithms so I will refrain from adding anything.
I LOVE THIS COLLECTION. Full Stop. I recommend it to absolutely everyone who loves great writing and the array of topics and subjects is bound to please just about everyone. It's a beautifully human and unifying book of essays and I love Jayne Anne Phillips (her editor, etc. who assisted in pulling this together) and for bringing it into existence. It's exactly what I needed in my life - in this bizarre and angry world -- and it has been an antidote and a lift to read and experience.. I give this memoir ALL THE STARS and then some.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I thought this was beautifully written. I enjoyed how this was a memoir, but it wasn't just a story of the author's life, it was moments that made her, changed her, or simply illustrate a feeling of a place or a time. I liked that some of the stories didn't seem like they were about her at all, but they conveyed a feeling we all share and as you progress through the book you start to get the hang of how she renders a feeling, more like brushstrokes and less like a black and white image.
I can see how some people may feel it's just a collection of stories and that it doesn't read like a traditional memoir, but that's what I loved about it. I loved getting the story of a different author or a story that focuses on someone else, but within that story you can relate to just the act of being human and you can see how these people are threads in her life that are all woven together to build her and who she is. I think its title "A Writer's Memoir" is apt because this isn't a memoir like you're use to reading. It is what she says, it's a writer's memoir, it's a writer telling her life in stories, some her own and some those of others.
I must also include that as a West Virginian who has moved elsewhere, it really spoke to the specific feeling I'm convinced only West Virginians know. There's just something in that place that gets into your bones and soul. You can never really go home again, but West Virginia follows you anywhere you go.
There's an understanding of what West Virginia is, her shortcomings, her beauty, the ancient landscape. How it's depicted versus how it really is. She captures the fact that West Virginia is two places, the north and the south, which have different accents, cultures, and could really be two different places entirely. I loved this because it's something I'm always trying to explain about West Virginia and no one truly understands it. I really appreciated this aspect of the storytelling.
Even though I've dedicated two paragraphs to the aspects of the book that are about West Virginia, it's more like the background music throughout the book. The story spans the country, but there's always a tether to where she came from and I just thought it was beautifully done.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it's my favorite book of the year so far and I am definitely now on a quest to read everything she's written.
I can see how some people may feel it's just a collection of stories and that it doesn't read like a traditional memoir, but that's what I loved about it. I loved getting the story of a different author or a story that focuses on someone else, but within that story you can relate to just the act of being human and you can see how these people are threads in her life that are all woven together to build her and who she is. I think its title "A Writer's Memoir" is apt because this isn't a memoir like you're use to reading. It is what she says, it's a writer's memoir, it's a writer telling her life in stories, some her own and some those of others.
I must also include that as a West Virginian who has moved elsewhere, it really spoke to the specific feeling I'm convinced only West Virginians know. There's just something in that place that gets into your bones and soul. You can never really go home again, but West Virginia follows you anywhere you go.
There's an understanding of what West Virginia is, her shortcomings, her beauty, the ancient landscape. How it's depicted versus how it really is. She captures the fact that West Virginia is two places, the north and the south, which have different accents, cultures, and could really be two different places entirely. I loved this because it's something I'm always trying to explain about West Virginia and no one truly understands it. I really appreciated this aspect of the storytelling.
Even though I've dedicated two paragraphs to the aspects of the book that are about West Virginia, it's more like the background music throughout the book. The story spans the country, but there's always a tether to where she came from and I just thought it was beautifully done.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it's my favorite book of the year so far and I am definitely now on a quest to read everything she's written.
April 27, 2026
This, then, was how language worked. And if it could save me, it could save us all. from Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips
Jayne Anne Phillips and I are were born in the same year. For all the differences in where we grew up, so many things she writes about struck a chord.
Toni home perms for preschoolers! Yes, happened to both of us. Reading comic books, specifically the Classics Illustrated, spurred us both to tackle the novels early on. The love for a dog. Recalling girls discussing their favorite Beatle.
“I was my mother’s only daughter,” Philips writes, “the one who would inherit the dishes, the cradles, the women’s things, the stories.” As an only daughter and eldest granddaughter, I inherited treasures from grandparents and great-grandparents.
She writes about Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. For me, it was his poetry that impacted me.
This memoir is a series of essays in which Phillips remembers her roots, her family and hometown, West Virginia’s history and character, and the people and places that made her, is inspiring.
Thanks to Knopf for a free book through NetGalley.
Jayne Anne Phillips and I are were born in the same year. For all the differences in where we grew up, so many things she writes about struck a chord.
Toni home perms for preschoolers! Yes, happened to both of us. Reading comic books, specifically the Classics Illustrated, spurred us both to tackle the novels early on. The love for a dog. Recalling girls discussing their favorite Beatle.
“I was my mother’s only daughter,” Philips writes, “the one who would inherit the dishes, the cradles, the women’s things, the stories.” As an only daughter and eldest granddaughter, I inherited treasures from grandparents and great-grandparents.
She writes about Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. For me, it was his poetry that impacted me.
This memoir is a series of essays in which Phillips remembers her roots, her family and hometown, West Virginia’s history and character, and the people and places that made her, is inspiring.
Thanks to Knopf for a free book through NetGalley.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I expected more of the essays to concern growing up in West Virginia -- they certainly were present, and to me, were the core of the book -- but there were several inclusions which felt a little random and took away from my overall appreciation of the collection.
The author's love of her hometown and home state was apparent and heartfelt, and beautifully described. She has a straight-forward, lightly nuanced writing style which I appreciate and relate to, and having grown up less than a decade later and in an adjacent state to West Virginia, felt like home to me.
The last essay, "Premature Burial," was the one that spoke to me loudest, using the title of an early 60's Roger Corman horror flick to draw parallels with the hidden poverty in her West Virginia town. It was beautifully done.
All in all, I enjoyed this, and hope to read more from the author.
I received a complimentary e-copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
The author's love of her hometown and home state was apparent and heartfelt, and beautifully described. She has a straight-forward, lightly nuanced writing style which I appreciate and relate to, and having grown up less than a decade later and in an adjacent state to West Virginia, felt like home to me.
The last essay, "Premature Burial," was the one that spoke to me loudest, using the title of an early 60's Roger Corman horror flick to draw parallels with the hidden poverty in her West Virginia town. It was beautifully done.
All in all, I enjoyed this, and hope to read more from the author.
I received a complimentary e-copy of the book from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Small Town Girls is an uneven but often compelling introduction to Phillips' nonfiction. The strongest essays are the personal ones, where she writes from lived experience - sharply observed and attentive to the textures of small-town life, they have a clarity and immediacy that makes them easy to sink into.
Other pieces didn't work as well for me. Some drift, sometimes into broader West Virginian history, sometimes into reflections on writing itself, and the shift in register is noticeable. These pieces aren't poorly crafted, but they feel like they belong to a different project. I found the change in pace and tone occasionally threw me off a little.
At its best, Phillips' prose is steady, thoughtful and luminous, so it's a shame the lack of cohesion in this collection means its impact is uneven.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
Other pieces didn't work as well for me. Some drift, sometimes into broader West Virginian history, sometimes into reflections on writing itself, and the shift in register is noticeable. These pieces aren't poorly crafted, but they feel like they belong to a different project. I found the change in pace and tone occasionally threw me off a little.
At its best, Phillips' prose is steady, thoughtful and luminous, so it's a shame the lack of cohesion in this collection means its impact is uneven.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
(I received an advance review copy of this book from the publisher.)
"Small Town Girls" is a collection of essays rather than a true memoir, which you wouldn't necessarily know from the title. The book itself is...fine. There were some essays that I enjoyed quite a bit, but many were mostly forgettable. Phillips's prose is poetic, and sometimes it's excellent; other times she doesn't stick the landing. In terms of themes, Phillips seems to capture the feel of her hometown in West Virginia pretty well, and she writes beautifully about mother-daughter relationships and female friendships. This is a decent book, but I expected more from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. I guess good fiction writing doesn't always translate to the essay form.
"Small Town Girls" is a collection of essays rather than a true memoir, which you wouldn't necessarily know from the title. The book itself is...fine. There were some essays that I enjoyed quite a bit, but many were mostly forgettable. Phillips's prose is poetic, and sometimes it's excellent; other times she doesn't stick the landing. In terms of themes, Phillips seems to capture the feel of her hometown in West Virginia pretty well, and she writes beautifully about mother-daughter relationships and female friendships. This is a decent book, but I expected more from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. I guess good fiction writing doesn't always translate to the essay form.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
I was so excited about this memoir and settled into the introduction of her hometown and family members... and then it became an essay collection touching on a TV show of her youth (which was so long I ended up skimming)... then back to a personal event... then a life story of another writer.... back to her personal life. Overall, I was disappointed with the jumping around and also the fact that only half of this memoir is about her personal life.
What she does share of her family, her hometown and how it shaped her is lovely and I would've loved for her to share more.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
What she does share of her family, her hometown and how it shaped her is lovely and I would've loved for her to share more.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
April 26, 2026
I love memoir and heard SMALL TOWN GIRLS praised on a book recommendation podcast I enjoy, so I decided to request it. The writing is strong and vivid, and I especially enjoyed the writer’s reflections on her youth and her hometown. At times, the content felt a bit uneven—some of the essays seemed to be about topics of interest to the author but didn’t feel like they fit well in the overall narrative arc of the book. Still, this was an interesting and edifying read.
May 4, 2026
Conventional wisdom says we are a product of our upbringing. In her memoir, Jayne Anne Phillips shares pieces of her life, youth through adulthood, her memories build an excellent picture of the world that molded her into the person and author she is today. The stories she shares are interesting and reveal her values and beliefs as she unwinds her relationships with the important people in her life. So many of her experiences are indeed shared by many small-town girls.
Did Not Finish
April 18, 2026DNF @ 28%
While I try to branch out and read things that I wouldn't normally enjoy, this hit the trifecta of my least favorite genres. As much as I wanted to push through, I just knew my rating wouldn't reflect the beautiful writing and memoir that others would appreciate more than I would.
Thank you to Alfred A Knopf for a physical copy of the ARC!
While I try to branch out and read things that I wouldn't normally enjoy, this hit the trifecta of my least favorite genres. As much as I wanted to push through, I just knew my rating wouldn't reflect the beautiful writing and memoir that others would appreciate more than I would.
Thank you to Alfred A Knopf for a physical copy of the ARC!
May 1, 2026
This is a beautifully written, poetic memoir in essay. It is a love story to a place - West Virginia, to an art - writing, to writers who died young, to the aithor's mother, and to life itself. This is a book that, while slim, requires time and attention to absorb and appreciate. Recommend to thoughtful readers.
Review of advance copy received from Publishers Weekly
This is an outstanding upcoming memoir that captures the authors life well and assorted histories of West Virginia that is written in a literary style without being cumbersome. I would recommend to lovers of biography that capture a feel for a place well.
May 4, 2026
This is a really difficult book for me to rate. It’s described as a memoir but it’s definitely more of a collection of different essays. Some are about the author and her growing up in rural West Virginia, but others are about different books, authors, movies and television shows. Some I enjoyed more than others, but I will say all of them were very well written. I enjoyed the ones that discussed West Virginia life and personal ones that spoke of the author’s mother/grandmother more than the others - although the essay about the Hatfields and the McCoys was really interesting.
I did not care for several essays that seemed to me to only recount the plot of whatever piece of work she was discussing (a movie she saw as a kid, a book by Stephen Crane, a television series).
I did not care for the essay about her abortion, it disturbed me. Overall a unique collection but not my favorite. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced digital copy. “Small Town Girls” was released 4/21 and is now available.
I did not care for several essays that seemed to me to only recount the plot of whatever piece of work she was discussing (a movie she saw as a kid, a book by Stephen Crane, a television series).
I did not care for the essay about her abortion, it disturbed me. Overall a unique collection but not my favorite. Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced digital copy. “Small Town Girls” was released 4/21 and is now available.
May 4, 2026
The essays about the author’s hometown shone brightly; the essays about other writers I found tedious. I decided to give Jayne Anne Phillips another try after Night Watch, which inexplicably (and undeservingly imo) won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I liked this collection of essays better.
Review of advance copy received from Goodreads Giveaways
This memoir was heartfelt. Great background and loved the story of the cover
photo. I enjoyed reading about her professional journey
photo. I enjoyed reading about her professional journey
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Luminous, gorgeous, unique, and well-written memoir in essays with some fantastic writing and an impeccable vibe. 5 stars. tysm for the E-ARC.
April 29, 2026
Unusual. Not the kind of memoir I was expecting, but well written.
May 1, 2026
Outstanding.
Want to Read
May 6, 2026(NF) 05.06.2026: another mid-week NY Times new release book review; a memoir about Buckhannon, W.Va...;
May 3, 2026
Small Town Girls: A Writer's Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips is a well written memoir, with vivid details and various stories of her small West Virginia town. As with all collection of essays I connected with some more than others. I most appreciated the essays about her life and the lives of her parents, and the essay about the geography of West Virginia was beautiful. The various essays about writers who influenced Phillips less so, but can understand their placement in a writer's memoir. Overall a wonderful collection of essays exploring the times and places important to the author.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my review e-arc.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for my review e-arc.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Jayne Anne Phillip’s upbringing in Appalachia influences the color and shape of her enticing memoir., Small Town Girls. This child of the 60s who grew up to be a Pulitzer Prize winning author will use her “numerous, scholarly, pensive, [and] nostalgic” voices to lure you into her authentic spaces in a time travel like experience. Her father encourages her to compete in dangerous games like archery with her brothers. Phillip's mother allows her to feed her reading addiction without any filtering of the book selection required. This results in the birth of Jayne's glorious idea that she knows far more than she’s supposed to know - because of the wonder of what she can learn by reading. Phillips discovers the powerful wiles of womanhood at the local beauty shop, with absolutely no boys or men allowed. And she learns that her quirky local Sunday School and, ALSO, both of her parents are neither perfect or even close to being right about everything. In the end Phillips discovers it is ok to learn about what you want and you can become your own authentic self in spite of the limitations set up in the world around you. I for one loved this authentic story. Thank you Netgalley and the Publishing group Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for this ARC to be published Apr 21 2026.
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