Small Town Girls
a writer's memoir
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Small Town Girls
Narrated by:
Jayne Anne Phillips
Pre-order Now for £15.09
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Narrated by:
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Jayne Anne Phillips
About this listen
“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 these pieces, and in her singular first-person voice, at once intimate and wide-ranging, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She re-creates the place she calls home, its foundational truths and the densely woven ties between the women of the town. She traces her journeys across the country and her discovery of writing and reading as tools for both survival and revelation, offering insights into the fellow writers and touchstones that moved and influenced her. From the local beauty salon to the legendary Hatfield–McCoy feud, from Jean Shrimpton and Barbara Stanwyck to Stephen Crane and Breece D'J Pancake, Phillips ponders her relationship with inspiration, spirituality, culture, and the troubled annals of the last American centuries.
Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and open-heartedness, Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history, Jayne Anne Phillips’s most personal, most accessible book yet—a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
Critic reviews
“Small Town Girls is 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
★ “Phillips’s prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow. . . . West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A sparkling introduction to the author for those who don’t know her, and a peek behind the scenes of her life for those who do. . . . A mosaic of her voices: humorous, scholarly, pensive, nostalgic.” —Margaret Quamme, Booklist
"What the film ‘The Last Picture Show’ began—Small Town Girls brings to fruition. This beautifully written revelation of the essence of The American Dream shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns. And on this shimmers a brilliant Joycean layer of how places create writers and writers create place." —Alice Randall, author of My Black Country
★ “Phillips’s prose is unflagging in its beauty and rhythm, and the memoir-leaning pieces have a special glow. . . . West Virginia has no more eloquent and grateful daughter. Boy, can she write.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“A sparkling introduction to the author for those who don’t know her, and a peek behind the scenes of her life for those who do. . . . A mosaic of her voices: humorous, scholarly, pensive, nostalgic.” —Margaret Quamme, Booklist
"What the film ‘The Last Picture Show’ began—Small Town Girls brings to fruition. This beautifully written revelation of the essence of The American Dream shines a light on the ways small towns created American girls, and the ways in which American girls created their small towns. And on this shimmers a brilliant Joycean layer of how places create writers and writers create place." —Alice Randall, author of My Black Country
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