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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 pagesThree. 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.
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Terri Schlichenmeyer’s Book Picks: Books About Health
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm SezEvery little sniffle. $28 – $30
Various page countsIt feels like you’ve caught them all, no matter how hard you try to avoid getting sick. You wash your hands, you cover your mouth and nose and wash some more. So now try these new health-related books and see if they don’t help.
They say that getting your steps in helps you live longer, and reading “Life After Cars” by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek (Thesis, $28) will make you eager to do so, rather than drive. In this book, you’ll see what more than a century’s worth of automobile use has done to the air you breathe, the environment, wildlife, human health and safety, the economy, and to lost productivity. It’s a book that calls for change or, at the very least, more mindfulness.
The bad news is that it’ll be allergy season soon.
The good news is that “All About Allergies” by Zachary Rubin, MD (Plume, $30) exists to help you make sense of them. You’re sneezing, your eyes are scratchy, your nose can’t stop running, and breathing normally ain’t happening. Rubin offers cutting-edge information about various allergies including food allergies, asthma, hay fever, and other reasons you feel a mess during certain seasons. (Out 2/24).
