Small Town Girls

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