Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir

Pulitzer-winning novelist Phillips (Night Watch) takes a lyrical look at her West Virginia upbringing in this wonderful memoir-in-essays. Born in 1952 in the small college and mining town of Buckhannon, Phillips muses that the area’s “long history and layered stories provided the perfect birthplace for a writer.” In “Premature Burial,” she juxtaposes the world of the movies, where life is “more the way [it] should be,” with the “grinding, entrenched poverty” in early 1960s Buckhannon. In “Outlaw Heart,” she ponders the distance between her mother, who longed to leave the town, and her resentful father. Elsewhere, Phillips reflects on important touchstones in her early life (“On Not Having a Daughter” details the abortion she underwent at age 20), and nods to her literary inspirations, including Red Badge of Courage author Stephen Crane, who portrayed the “ ‘familiar and low’ as lives that formed and commented on America as it truly was,” and fellow West Virginian Breece D’J Pancake, who sketched the “loss and wrenching cruelty” of life in Appalachia. Equal parts wistful and pragmatic, Phillips’s autopsy of rural mid-century America doubles as a haunting and insightful self-portrait. Even readers unfamiliar with the author’s fiction will be riveted. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)