SMALL TOWN GIRLS

A collection of personal essays by the much-awarded fiction writer.

While many of the 22 essays included in this collection contain memoir material, others report on topics such as the Hatfield-McCoy feud or a shooting at a church in Kentucky; there are moving portraits of writers Stephen Crane and Breece D’J Pancake and a lovely tribute to Barbara Stanwyck and The Big Valley. Phillips’ prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow, infused with her profound nostalgia for her Appalachian childhood. From a dreamy, seductive recollection of the beauty salon in her small West Virginia town: “Quiet now, they lay back in their chairs, heads swallowed up by the deep, slotted sinks. I noticed how their legs fell slightly apart. Their hands relaxed. Uniformed girls massaged their scalps with careless efficiency, and the women closed their eyes….Women went to the beauty shop to be with other women, to engage in private rituals that supposedly had to do with men, yet the men were wholly absent.” Her mother is a strong presence in the book; the topic of her death is the ultimate topic of the final essay, “Premature Burial.” An essay devoted to refuting Kenneth Tynan’s assertion that writers hate to write contains an encomium to the novelist’s labor that begins like this: “We might compare getting started on a story to starting a relationship (oh, that first time together, lying down skin to skin!) or beginning a novel to committing to a marriage. Each long-term liaison is laden with its own miracles and traps: There is the young marriage, the second marriage, the late marriage in which indolent time does not exist and all is revealed at the first touch.” Buy the book to read the rest of this paragraph alone. But know that it grew out of many previously published pieces and is more enjoyable if you don’t go into it expecting the immersive flow of a memoir.

West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write.