Jayne Anne Phillips: Writing Reveals Secrets
In this interview, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jayne Anne Phillips discusses writing about the coming-of-age in the 1970s with her new memoir, Small Town Girls.
Jayne Anne Philips is the author of six novels, including Night Watch, Quiet Dell, Lark And Termite, MotherKind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and two widely anthologized story collections, Fast Lanes, and Black Tickets. Night Watch was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Longlisted for the National Book Award; Quiet Dell was a Wall Street Journal and Kirkus Review Best Fiction selection. Lark And Termite, winner of the Heartland Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Prix de Medici Etranger.Machine Dreams, chosen as one of (12) New York Times’ Best Books of the year, was a finalist for National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Black Tickets, awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy, is often cited as a book of stories that influenced a generation of writers. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, Phillips is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Learn more at JayneAnnePhillips.com, and follow her on Facebook and Instagram.
In this interview, Jayne discusses writing about the coming-of-age in the 1970s with her new memoir, Small Town Girls, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Jayne Anne Phillips
Literary agent: Lynn Nesbit
Book title: Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Release date: April 21, 2026
Genre/category: Memoir
Previous titles: Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, Quiet Dell, and Night Watch (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Elevator pitch: A memoir in essays reflecting on the mysteries of memory and the origins of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. This is a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing. “Even readers unfamiliar with her fiction will be riveted,” says Publisher’s Weekly.
What prompted you to write this book?
Small Town Girls is a memoir of what I’ve loved, of what I’ve chosen or witnessed or lost. We are surely defined by what we love and by the sorrows we learn to accept. Time itself seems to me to be a circular, living energy in which the dimensions of past, present, and future exist simultaneously. This “writer’s memoir” is meant to be read as a novel, from first page to last; but regardless, the pieces emerge and resonate with one another in an arc that begins with generational inheritance and ends in transformation.
I was too young to understand the 50s, yet I was a witness to that ambiance, that decade which seems to me now a dream with such dark, burned edges. The 60s were a counter measure, an infusion of energy from a generation whose energy was undiluted by social media: Woodstock and the summer of love followed by earthshaking political violence. The 1970s saw the devastating end to the Vietnam War and the coming of age of my generation—I wanted to make these decades a sensory reality, take readers inside a daily life, drenched in sensation. Fiction is always time travel. These stories of
origin extend to place as well in pieces like “Paradise Lost: West Virginia,” which traces geologic time and abundance into the human era of settlements, families, winners and losers, and the undeniable beauty of that story. Small Town Girls references two shootings because gun violence is part of American life, then and now. Yet the core of Small Town Girls is surely the resilience of human beings, particularly of women, and a completely necessary sense of presence beyond ourselves—the surround of the natural world, gardens to mountains, and the rituals of churches, funerals, family vigils, evoked
in this book. Writing is a kind of demanding savior for the writer, and the pieces about writing itself speak to the religion that writers practice: saying the truth, saving a world from vanishing.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I sent my agent, Lynn Nesbit, a long manuscript of separate pieces, memoir pieces, idea pieces, essays on writers and writing. She responded with such enthusiasm that
this was the book, the very personal writing that evoked the past yet spoke to the present. These pieces were composed of the same DNA, and set up such echoes and
callings to one another: That was the new element of writing this book. Listening, writing into the core of an established world and point of view, was a very different journey. I’ve never written a book from my own POV before, in my own first-person voice. It’s revealing and risky in a different way, a way that joins forces with the reader completely.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The initial surprise was my discovery of a vintage photograph that is literally
an image of the small-town girls of my experience. I suddenly remembered this picture though I hadn’t seen it in many years: a photo of the newspaper staff taken for the high school yearbook, the year I was 16. The yearbook rejected it because
everyone is distracted, looking here and there, and one of the boys is teasing a senior girl, the editor (women in power get hassled). I had shown it to my husband years ago and he actually found it in one of many letter boxes stacked in a closet. The surprise, too, was that the very talented designers at Knopf loved the photograph and made it into such an evocative image for the cover of Small Town Girls. It’s, well, perfect for the book. We used maybe half of the original image so that the faces are clear. The Acknowledgments of Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir explain the history of the photographer, who took all of the high school pictures, as well as many photographs of the town, for some 65 years. Today his son-in-law maintains his archives and was able to assign us the right to use the picture.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
It was surprising to me that the individual pieces, edited, shortened in many cases, re-written in others, moved around until they were a kind of map of the past spilling into the present, were so connected to one another. The point of view, from the beginning, is that of the writer, narratives of the childhood of someone who would become a writer, who remembered, as a writer does, certain details, sounds, smells, images, so intensely, in that vast veil of forgetfulness in which we all live. And of course,
writing reveals secrets, lost things, all that wasn’t apparent; I used to develop my own photographs when I had the use of a university dark room, and that magical, ghostly process of the paper in the developing pan, the image coming clearer and clearer in
its bath, always fascinated me. Words perform the same miracle, going deeper, reverberating, clarifying. Every picture tells a story, and every story reveals pictures that only words can find.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Every reader reads a book differently; reading is so intimate, so private, so full. We all start out as small-town girls, in a sense, in that infancy of shared identity with our mothers, into the nuclear family or some version of it, into village, community, school, into excitement and betrayal and desire and knowledge. I hope readers can feel their way inside their own origins again, their own deathless connections, and feel some alliance with the journey of the book. The miraculous lives writers live, the transformation of shattering loss, the magician’s wand of time coloring all, all that is left and moves forward, illuminated—really shining, even though this is real life.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Read deeply and broadly; if a book moves and stays with you, read all of that author’s work, read about the author and the history he or she lived through. Certain writers can become our lifelong allies. Though they may have lived 200 years ago, we feel in their work a transcendence that supports our own endeavors. And our allies can change as we complete our own books and move on to writing others, penetrating a different universe may require different allies. So many writers who teach writing workshops tell me that their students want to write, but they’ve read very little. Writers need fed. I mean, fiction is brain surgery in a shifting, ineffable form that appears and disappears and finally comes true if we have the persistence and doggedness to follow through and stay inside it to the end. It’s good to be in awe of writing that has come before us or exists alongside us. When we aren’t writing, we should be reading. Writers who persist are world-class readers, and despite the bad news that might surround us, and the fact of death, we can escape into meaning, into the acknowledgment that all lives matter and connect and continue.
