Small Town Girls: a writer's memoir

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • OPRAH'S #1 MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 • A luminous memoir in essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, who reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory.

“A brilliant, wide-ranging book, nostalgic and tough-minded at the same time. Like Willa Cather and Stephen Crane, Jayne Anne Phillips writes prose that reads like plainspoken poetry, full of startling and vivid images that bring a vanished world back to life before our eyes.” —Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers

“The painful thing about adolescence is that everything seems absolute, and the painful thing about adulthood is that nothing does.”

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 traveled to other times and places. In her distinctive first-person voice, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her closeness with her mother. She re-creates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties among the women of the town. She traces her journeys across the country and her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation, offering 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.

Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and openheartedness, Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history, and 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.