Almost a century ago, a famous Appalachian writer announced that you can’t go home again. Jayne Anne Phillips, the region’s greatest living writer, suggests that maybe, actually, you can’t ever leave. “I have patterned my adult life on escape and redemption,” she writes, “redemption being the circling back, the writing, the saving of a version of events that is emotionally real, that can’t ever recede or be lost.”
Phillips has returned to her West Virginia roots in prize-winning fiction (her last novel, Night Watch, won the Pulitzer). Now, she circles back in Small Town Girls, a poignant and generous memoir composed of personal essays about her own life and about her misunderstood home state. This coming-of-age story doubles as regional collage. We see what Phillips saw as much as we see her own life unfolding.
The book’s affection is especially strong toward postwar women, mothers in particular. Phillips also portrays unpredictable boyfriends, beloved dogs, and eccentric roommates. She writes wistfully about being dropped off at cinemas for matinees with friends, and about watching the great Barbara Stanwyck in “The Big Valley” on TV. She recounts road trips and summer Bible school, the notorious feud of the Hatfields and McCoys, as well as a terrible school shooting in neighboring Kentucky. She writes about her own writing life and about two writers who died young, including West Virginia’s favorite son, Breece D’J Pancake. She writes about babies, and she writes about death. Skipping around in time, taking in history as well as memory, these essays make a state famous for coal mines and a John Denver song seem like a stage all of us have crossed.
Throughout, Phillips is wistful without being sentimental. Her lens is love not nostalgia. Still, so much of what she depicts conveys the blinkered innocence we associate with postwar American small towns. Phillips’ home is Buckhannon, West Virginia, whose Main Street, coordinated by three stoplights, was lined with stores “owned by men whose fathers owned the stores.” On national holidays, Main Street played host to parades filled with floats and majorettes. The town’s doctors, respected and revered, made house calls as a rule. Westerns dominated network TV. Summers were for unorganized outdoor play (“fishing or hiking, throwing rocks at copperheads”). Phone numbers in Buckhannon had three digits, matching the downtown stoplights. Like “Friday Night Lights” but with coal-dusted air, high school football was cultural king. Women in the author’s family went by two names, such as Jayne Anne. Even in a place this small (and overwhelmingly white and Protestant), there was the class divide of town kids and country kids. Everyone knew everyone else. Almost no one ever left. Those who did were haunted by the idea of lost home, and carried some guilt for deeming it insufficient. “Understand,” Phillips declares, as one of those who wandered, “born and raised in West Virginia, you can never truly leave.” But then she tells us, looking back, that her whole life has been patterned by flight and an attempt to account for that flight. You can’t go home again, but you can go on forever looking over your shoulder—and telling about what you left behind.
Phillips is at her wisdom-literature best in discussing the older women she observed growing up. In an especially moving essay, “Shop Talk,” she describes the weekly gathering in beauty shops, where the town’s women engage in “truly archetypal gossip” and “private rituals.” In the absence of therapists and the distractions of smartphones, the beauty shop possesses a “mythical atmosphere.” Already as a young person, Phillips intuits the power of this protected space for women, even as she senses the darker conformities there. In her teenage years, she begins participating in these rituals with her mother. Decades removed from the scenes now, their narrow contradictions cooled by time, she offers an extraordinary gesture of understanding and empathy for this emblematic ritual and place: “Can we forgive women for thinking of beauty? Can we forgive our mothers for hoping we’ll be beautiful? Can we forgive one another for fanning out the hand of cards dealt us by our families, our hometowns, by the cultures in which we all exist?”
In Moby-Dick, Melville describes a throwing of our costliest robes over each other’s blemishes as a way to acknowledge and defend each other’s dignity. Is this what our most powerful writing does, in the end, in the form of open questions to a world that resists our best efforts to understand and improve it? Or am I just moved by Phillips’ generosity because our default mode now is pulling back curtains, taking away robes, exposing each other and the worlds we’re born into with overconfident critique. Phillips knows she needs to escape this mountain world. Still, at the end of “Shop Talk,” she offers the women who will not escape a final offer of grace: “I watched the women who were trimmed and permed and crimped. Were they there to be beautiful? To fail in some dream of themselves? I think they were there to be together. One afternoon a week in their buffeted lives, someone took care of them.”
Phillips’ own story centers these essays, but her lenses are wide, pulling in all of West Virginia’s tested history. Native Americans treated the forested hills as a hunting ground, she explains, not as a place suitable for settling. Welsh and English farmers were content to try their luck on small plots of difficult land. Big timber interests arrived, followed by big coal. Deep mining gave way to strip mining and the blasting off of mountain tops. “Central Appalachia,” she writes, “one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world, is no longer a paradise.”
In this book about West Virginia, there is no mention of Obama or Biden, Trump or Vance. This is not a primer on how part of the country tilted resentfully red. There’s a hint of the culture wars in the chapter on the horrific school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky, but Phillips is not using these stories to explain Appalachia. She is locating herself, what Thoreau called tracking yourself. Along her autobiographical way, she offers beautiful arias, such as this one, looking back on her twenties, when she lived with quirky roommates and faced a future without clear paths: “Where were we all really going, and when would we ever arrive? Our destinations appeared to be interchangeable pauses in some long, lyric transit. This time that was nearly over, these years, seems as close to family as most of us would ever get.”
In a different essay, she captures the forever bright feeling of coming out of the movies with a sense of having glimpsed something important, even as you return (or are returned) to the ordinary light: “There is no clean shot in life. There is Kanawha Street, shimmering with rain and darkness when we walk out of the lighted theater. And there is my father’s big white Ford, floating like a boat on the rain-slicked blacktop, wipers clacking, motor idling, the headlights sending two long beams through the dark. I see rain falling in the light, and the oily puddles at my feet are faceted with color.” Those contrasts are striking: the rain and the light, the oiliness and the prism color—the young writer feeling opposite things and discovering in those contradictions a vocation.
More than anything, this memoir pays mournful tribute to beloved people and to a place of natural beauty that is often caricatured as backward and stubbornly behind. The story of her mother and her grandmother, Phillips writes, is “shot through with luminous sorrow.” These essays are too. But there’s a quiet, persistent love inside that sadness. Half a century ago, Phillips left, she realizes, in order to tell about her childhood world. In Small Town Girls, she throws her best garments (or maybe a good Appalachian quilt) over the people she left behind, and over the hometown vivid in her memory, and over the whole scarred Mountain State, and maybe over the rest of us too, not to deny the blemishes and blind spots, but to cover them.
