Though the Pulitzer Prize she received for her 2023 novel, The Night Watch, was well deserved, it didn't take that honor to confirm Jayne Anne Phillips's status as one of America's preeminent contemporary fiction writers. But in a career that has spanned nearly 50 years, Phillips has never produced a work of nonfiction. Small Town Girls, her varied and confiding memoir in essays, remedies that omission and further demonstrates the breadth of her talent.
Born in 1952, Phillips grew up in the tiny town of Buckhannon, home to West Virginia Wesleyan College and, during her childhood, a thriving coal-mining industry. Roughly half of the 22 pieces in the collection touch on how that upbringing helped shape her identity. It's a place--"geographically isolated and relentlessly exploited by outsiders and some insiders, all looking to sell paradise and make a buck"--that she views with a mixture of pride and candor tinged with melancholy.
The "star-crossed, dramatic life" of Phillips's mother, the descendant of a wealthy family that lost its fortune in the Great Depression, is a recurring subject. Phillips, who holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, also offers several impressive examples of her literary sensibility and journalism. Among them are tributes to novelist Stephen Crane and to Phillips's West Virginia contemporary Breece D'J Pancake, whose prose, she writes, "has the clarity of a struck bell" and who died by suicide in 1979, at age 26. In these and the other essays, she consistently penetrates to a subject's emotional core, in the process revealing to her readers her own life alongside a bit of their own humanity. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer