Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history –– Jayne Anne Phillips’s love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
It seems unlikely that such a hodgepodge could offer the thoroughness of a traditional autobiography, but Small Town Girls does. The book’s format is an apt reflection of its themes. Like the best of Ms. Phillips’s fiction, its structure mimics the fracturing of modern American life as she has witnessed it ... Both epic and intimate ... This has been her literary project: to remember, to revive, to conjure, to connect, in images shuffled and shaped into stories.
Lovely, multifaceted ... Phillips brings to this memoir the kind of resonant details and sharp insights that have enriched her fiction ... At once nostalgic and clear-eyed.
Rich with evocative descriptions of her hometown, Buckhannon, W.Va. ... Her love and respect for the people and their pasts, and for the splendor of the landscape give the writing at times the feel of a meditation, one that is ideally served by the eloquence and precision of the author’s prose ... Brilliantly detailed ... One of the finest descriptions I have read of how a fiction writer’s mind works.
