Jayne Anne Phillips, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, has written a memoir about her childhood that manages to be both heartbreaking and satisfying. The book, "Small Town Girls," draws from Phillips' early years and mines them for the kind of intimate details that only someone who lived through them can capture with precision.
Phillips has spent decades writing fiction that excavates family secrets and small-town American life. Her novels have the texture of memory, which makes sense now that she's writing from actual memory. The memoir reads like one of her novels, which is either a compliment to her craft as a fiction writer or a testament to how little distance exists between her invented worlds and the real one she inhabited.
What emerges isn't a standard origin story. Phillips doesn't position her childhood as the seed that bloomed into a successful literary career. Instead, she examines the specific weight of growing up in particular places, with particular people, during a particular era. The specificity is what matters. Small towns produce small catastrophes and small triumphs, and Phillips honors both with equal attention.
The bittersweet quality comes through in how she handles her subjects. There's affection here, but no sentimentality. No false reconciliation. Just the complicated truth of having lived somewhere and having left it.