Description

A luminous memoir by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips

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 travelled to other times and places.

In Small Town Girls, Phillips 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 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.

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.

‘Beautifully written… shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns’ ALICE RANDALL

‘A brilliant, wide-ranging book, nostalgic and tough-minded at the same time’ TOM PERROTTA

‘Phillips’ prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm… West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter’ KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEW

Publisher Review

This beautifully written revelation of the essence of The American Dream shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns. And on this shimmers a brilliant Joycean layer of how places create writers and writers create place * Alice Randall, author of My Black Country * 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 * Phillips’s prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow… West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write * Kirkus, starred review * A sparkling introduction to the author for those who don’t know her, and a peek behind the scenes of her life for those who do… A mosaic of her voices: humorous, scholarly, pensive, nostalgic * Booklist * Wonderful. . . . 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 * Publishers Weekly, starred review *