Book Review: Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips

By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez

“Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir” by Jayne Anne Phillips
c.2026, Knopf $28.00 208 pages

Three. Two.

One.

Not that your parents were counting, but to them, it seemed as if you were born one day and then you were off like a rocket. Off to college, a good life, the kind of adventure they never had. Time zoomed past while they gave you a good launching pad and then, as in the new memoir, “Small Town Girls” by Jayne Anne Phillips, they sent you out among the stars.

“Home” means something different to just about everyone but for Phillips, it’s “a small town, nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of north central West Virginia… where history is interspersed with family stories and myths.” It’s where everyone knew everyone else, where poverty lived next to solid middle-class, where kids played with one another outside as much as they could. It’s where Phillips grew up.

“We seem to have lived here forever,” she says, “even before we were born.”

Her hometown is the kind of place where there are parades on every holiday, complete with school bands and girls twirling shiny batons. Her mother taught at the local school, where Phillips attended after a summer of Bible school; once a week, she and her mother went to the beauty parlor, where Phillips loved the feminine mystery of the place but she got a pixie cut there once, and hated it.

“Maybe,” she says, “I was eager, even then, to be a woman, no matter what…”

She was a good daughter, though she and her mother argued sometimes – especially once Phillips went off to college on the cusp of the Women’s Rights Movement. Still, they were tied – by place, by family, and by stories Phillips’ mother told about her own mother, for whom she cared as the elder woman lay dying.

“In West Virginia,” Phillips says, “you are your people…” and having a daughter is a “woman’s birthright,” representing a lineage that reaches back through generations. She and her mother might have diverged, but “she taught me to be like her.”

Before you start “Small Town Girls,” find a box and keep it close. You’ll need it to hold the shattered pieces of your heart.

And yet – though that’s a feature, it’s not all sadness. Author Jayne Anne Phillips includes a few gentle laughs in this book, and pages dripping with nostalgia for a place that you generally only find on MeTV these days. She writes about the kind of things that many Baby Boomers will remember: going to college in the 1970s, loving a dog, hitchhiking across the country, caring for an aging loved one, starting a family, it’s almost as if Phillips grew up next door and shared the same experiences you had. Bonus: her tales are clean – there’s no profanity or bedroom scenes in them at all – making this a book you can share with anyone.

And share you will, because this book practically begs for sentimental discussion and sessions of reminiscing. If you’re looking for a memoir to love, “Small Town Girls” will send you over the moon.