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, while exploring aspects of the life and culture of her often-dismissed native state. 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's characterization of herself as her mother's "spiritual emissary" underscores the closeness of their relationship, particularly in the aftermath of her parents' divorce, and especially in her mother's final days, as she died of lung cancer in Phillips's home, where she lived for the final 13 months of her life.
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. She paints a vivid portrait of the notorious 19th-century feud between the Hatfields and McCoys, and recalls a shooting at a Paducah, Ky., high school in 1997 that took the lives of three girls as they left their before-school prayer gathering.
But Phillips's range isn't limited to pieces like these or recollections of her life in West Virginia. Through the accretion of modest details, "Real People" is a skillful and moving portrait of her observations at a distance of the young family that once lived across the street from her in a New Jersey suburb. In "On Not Having a Daughter," she frankly relates her experience of an abortion as a college student. 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
Shelf Talker: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips turns to nonfiction for the first time with an impressive collection of personal essays, literary criticism, and journalism.