SMALL TOWN GIRLS: A Writer’s Memoir, By Jayne Anne Phillips
Most fiction writers have given so much of their own experiences to their characters that, after long careers, they are rarely inspired to become late-life autobiographers. Over the years, however, many are likely to have published a variety of nonfiction pieces — personal essays, talks, introductions, contributions to anthologies — a curation of which might illuminate how a person came to be the successful writer that she is.
Most of Jayne Anne Phillips’s memoir, “Small Town Girls,” is taken from such earlier sources. Phillips, whose 1979 story collection “Black Tickets” and 1984 novel “Machine Dreams” were recognized as virtuoso debuts in their respective genres, is also the author of six other books of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2023 novel “Night Watch.”
Her new book is rich with evocative descriptions of her hometown, Buckhannon, W.Va., whose “long history and layered stories” she has come to believe “provided the perfect birthplace for a writer.” That part of rural Appalachia “was beautiful then,” she recalls wistfully; now a “paradise lost” — to industrialization, mountaintop removal mining and fracking.
No one knows better than those who, like Phillips herself, eventually move elsewhere, that if you are “born and raised in West Virginia, you can never truly leave.” Generations of her family had roots there, and no matter how far she goes or for how long, her ties to that patch of earth remain tenacious.
Her love and respect for the people and their pasts, and for the splendor of the landscape — her compassion for the victims of the region’s devastating poverty and her grief at the ruin of “one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world” — 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.
Phillips dedicates her book to both kinds of small-town girls: “those who left, and those who stayed.” Among the latter is Phillips’s mother, a highly capable and resilient influence on her daughter’s life. One of the town’s few women to work outside the home — teaching elementary school while at the same time studying for her graduate degree — Mrs. Phillips was also one of its “first ‘respectable’” divorcées. “She raised the kind of daughter she herself had been,” Phillips writes, “a precocious confidante, a young girl already possessed of a woman’s mind and an old woman’s intuition.”
A lesson learned early: “Men were undependable, but women were there for one another, and the bond between mother and daughter was the strongest bond of all.” In an essay called “On Not Having A Daughter,” which is partly about an abortion Phillips had at 20, she makes clear that, for her, that absence has been an enduring sorrow.
“Shop Talk” takes us into the “sanctum” of the town beauty shop, where women went “to be with other women” and young Jayne Anne is the “silent observer” — the writer in the making on whom nothing is lost. Relaxed and chatty, Mrs. Phillips frets aloud that her daughter might not be taking the importance of female pulchritude seriously enough. “I’m afraid she’ll always be a plain Jane,” she tells the proprietor. There is photographic evidence that Jayne Anne was a mere toddler when her mother gave her her first perm.
In the beauty shop the author becomes an ardent reader of Vogue, once asking her mother, in one of the book’s lighter pieces, if she can have “wispy bangs like Jean Shrimpton’s.” (“Absolutely not,” came the reply. “You’d look like a spaniel.”)
There are other, profounder appreciations: Stephen Crane, whom Phillips considers an early mentor (“distrusting rules” as he does “to write the devastating truth no matter what it cost him”), and her fellow West Virginian Breece D’J Pancake, a writer of outstanding originality and promise who took his own life at 26.
“The incomparable Barbara Stanwyck” is the subject of an essay about the actress’s starring role as the “steely” matriarch in the 1960s TV western “The Big Valley.” (Phillips’s laudation seems well deserved, but I found the overly detailed synopses of the show’s episodes bogged the writing down.)
Phillips writes generously and insightfully about people she has known and recollects with special tenderness the times she shared with her beloved dog Sasha. But one of her best pieces, “Real People,” is about a family whose name she never learns. This brilliantly detailed portrait of the neighbors across the street, observed by Phillips from a window above her desk over a period of seven years, is one of the finest descriptions I have read of how a fiction writer’s mind works.
Phillips was the middle child, between two boys. The sons “followed my father into a personal mythology in which men were defined by their work, strengthened and honed by physical labor, their independence expressed in deliberate, nearly telegraphed oral communication.” Crucially, “the power of women was expressed in talk and domicile; the power of men in quiet and mobility, in the painstaking care of implements, machinery, vehicles.” Growing up, as the brothers became “engaged in work and speed,” their sister “stood still, looking and listening.”
Some of that listening took place in the kitchen, while Jayne Anne helped her mother with the dishes. “It’s when I hear all the stories about high school, her boyfriends and suitors, our town and everyone in it: all she knows about my father’s people and his other life, the one he led before he met her.” What her mother likely never suspected was how much she was nurturing her child’s own gift and passion for storytelling, and, at the same, laying an obligation on her — to remember it all, and thus to preserve it.
As Phillips writes in “Outlaw Heart,” her contribution to a series of essays by writers on their vocation: “Surely our hope in holding a world still between the covers of a book is to make the world known, to save it from vanishing.”
Surely.
SMALL TOWN GIRLS: A Writer’s Memoir | By Jayne Anne Phillips | Knopf | 208 pp. | $28
The post The ‘Perfect Birthplace for a Writer’? She Says It’s West Virginia. appeared first on New York Times.
