‘Small Town Girls’ Review: West Virginia on Her Mind
A Review in The Wall Street Journal
Published April 27th, 2026
By Donna Rifkind
“Every year in May, the small Appalachian town of Buckhannon, W.Va., hosts a weeklong Strawberry Festival. It began in the 1930s as a booster for the local farms that were once a mainstay of the area and are now mostly gone. Yet the celebrations continue, with parades and their marching bands, pie-eating contests and quilt shows, tractor exhibits and neon-lit carnival rides. Jayne Anne Phillips, who was born and raised in Buckhannon, recalls long-ago images of the festival as it was in the late 1950s: “The year my cousin was queen, I was six and one of the flower girls in her court. We wore white organdy dresses and waved regally from the queen’s frothy float. The parade wound its way through town, slowly, for hours, as though coursing through a collective dream.”
Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir
The blurred boundary between dreams and memories is a recurring element in Ms. Phillips’s memoir, “Small Town Girls,” as it is in the six novels and the handful of short-story collections she’s written to date. Her book rejects the linear chronology of a typical memoir. Instead it’s an assemblage of short pieces, many of which have previously appeared in such publications as Harper’s, Vogue and Bookforum. Some are vignettes from Ms. Phillips’s early years, while others speak of her nomadic young adulthood, her parents’ divorce and their deaths, and her own experiences as a mother….”
Read more at: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/small-town-girls-review-west-virginia-on-her-mind-344020da
