Small Town Girls

Jayne Anne Phillips structures her memoir as a series of interconnected personal essays rather than a linear autobiography. The chapters move associatively across time and subject, bound together by recurring preoccupations: her small-town West Virginia upbringing, her family's layered history, her relationship with her mother, and her formation as a writer.

Phillips opens by establishing Buckhannon, a small town in the Allegheny Mountains, as the foundational landscape of her life. She recalls a thriving Main Street and her early love of reading, nurtured by weekly library visits with her mother. She introduces her parents: her mother, a teacher finishing college while raising three children, and her father, Russell Randolph Phillips, a taciturn man who owned a concrete company. Both sides of the family helped settle western Virginia before the Revolutionary War, and Phillips evokes the rituals of small-town life, from the annual Strawberry Festival to house calls by Dr. Jake, the family physician.

In "Report of the Spies," Phillips recounts childhood encounters at the Methodist church. At five or six, during Bible school, light from a stained-glass window fell on her, and she experienced a visionary moment, feeling herself inside Christ's warmth, hearing voices across time. At 10, she gave a Sunday school presentation questioning God's command to take land from those who already occupied it. The minister, Reverend Snow, kissed her forehead in the receiving line, and she looked up at the round glass eye in the dome, recognizing it as a mirror, a spy: an image fusing spiritual perception with the watchful stance of the future writer.

Phillips explores the world of women through the beauty shop her mother frequented, a female sanctum where conversations about men, seduction, and survival unfolded. She recalls the humiliation of being declared a "plain Jane" by the proprietor and her mother, then given a pixie cut. She traces her mother's wider life: teaching elementary school, earning a master's degree, and eventually becoming one of the first "respectable" divorced women in Buckhannon. Other essays use the 1960s television Western The Big Valley and supermodel Jean Shrimpton as lenses for exploring women's fortitude and adolescent longing for freedom.

"Burning The Trees" centers on family dynamics. Phillips positions herself as the middle child between two brothers who followed their father into a mythology of masculine labor, while she stood apart to observe and articulate. The essay builds toward the father's annual ritual of burning caterpillar webs from fruit trees with a kerosene torch, then shifts into a visionary register: the trees bloom with fire, and Phillips writes that her mother has died before her father, that he walks toward the children glowing against the flames, and they realize he has been gone for many years, collapsing memory and loss into a single image.

An extended historical essay traces West Virginia's arc from primeval wilderness to economic exploitation. Phillips follows the arrival of European settlers, frontier violence, political battles over slavery, West Virginia's secession from Virginia in 1863, and the devastation wrought by timber barons, coal companies, and mountaintop mining. Woven into this history are intimate family stories. Her maternal grandfather, J. W. Thornhill, a lumber mill owner, moved a mistress into the family home and grew increasingly confused and violent before being committed to the state asylum, where he died. Her father's story is more painful: abandoned as an infant by his mother, Icie, he was raised by a series of great-aunts after his father, Warwick, showed no interest in him. Late in life, a great-aunt casually revealed that Icie had once returned to reclaim the baby, but by then "he was used to us." Phillips's father, hearing this for the first time at 70, only raised his brows.

The memoir turns outward in several essays. Phillips retells the Hatfield-McCoy feud as a story of economic deprivation rather than hillbilly violence, tracing its roots to a dispute over timberland and the discovery of coal. She reports on the December 1997 Heath High School shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, attending the combined funeral of three girls killed by 14-year-old Michael Carneal during a before-school prayer session. She chronicles Nathan, a first-grader whose bruises Phillips's mother discovered at school. Phillips's mother placed him with foster parents, but the county returned him because it could not keep him from the home if his parents consented to visits. The family disappeared, and Phillips rode to the abandoned house to search for Nathan's cowboy boots but found nothing; he had taken everything with him.

Phillips traces her life through her dogs, particularly Sasha, a reddish-blond puppy she adopted in college and kept for 12 years across roughly 20 moves. After a stranger in Austin, Texas, shot Sasha with birdshot, she recovered and accompanied Phillips through graduate school in Iowa City, her marriage, and the birth of her son. When Sasha developed cancer, the vet came to the house, and Phillips lay down with her for the injection.

In "Rayme," Phillips portrays a deeply troubled friend from her communal living days in Morgantown, West Virginia. Rayme's mother had died by suicide in Argentina, slowly refusing to eat, and Rayme deteriorated through erratic behavior before checking herself into the university hospital. After release, she moved in with Phillips, building altars and refusing medication. The essay closes at a deserted lake where Rayme called from the water to ask whether Phillips had thought about killing herself after her abortion. Phillips yelled back: "No. Come out of the water."

Literary essays examine Stephen Crane, whom Phillips considers her literary mentor, and Breece D'J Pancake, the West Virginia short story writer born 20 days apart from Phillips, whose 12 stories she considers among the best ever written. Pancake died by suicide on April 8, 1979, at 26, days before letters arrived accepting him for writing residencies, one listing Phillips's own name among the fellows. In "The Widow Speaks," Phillips meditates on writing and silence, invoking the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who died by suicide in wartime exile, and the Polish writer Bruno Schulz, shot dead in the Drohobych ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1942.

At 20, Phillips became pregnant despite her IUD and drove out of state with her lover for an abortion, which was illegal locally in 1973. During the procedure, she experienced a wordless moment in which something separate from cells and blood withdrew. A psychic later told her she had lost a girl child. In "Outlaw Heart," Phillips traces her awakening to language's power, recalling how at eight or nine she found her father's hidden paperbacks and opened John Updike's Rabbit, Run to the scene of a woman losing her baby in the bathtub. She recognized the character from her own nightmares and arrived at a foundational insight: "This, then, was how language worked. And if it could save me, it could save us all."

The memoir's final essay, "Premature Burial," braids Phillips's 1962 childhood moviegoing with her mother's long decline and death. She recalls watching a Roger Corman film about a man who builds an elaborate mausoleum to prevent being buried alive, all its escape devices failing. Watching at 10, amid her parents' failing marriage and the family's financial precarity, Phillips recognized her own imperative: She was plotting escape through watching, perceiving, and remembering everything that mattered. Years later, her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer at 58 and eventually moved in with Phillips, who was seven months pregnant. Her mother lived nearly the entire first year of her grandson's life. The death came on a November midnight. Afterward, Phillips sat beside a half-frozen pond at the crematorium while smoke ascended. She reflects that she patterned her life on escape and redemption: escape as flight and self-reliance, redemption as the writing that saves a version of events, emotionally real, that can never be lost. The smoke darkened, lightened, and disintegrated in the fog, completely taken up.