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.