Small Town Girls

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.