Jayne Anne Phillips memoir
Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips has a new memoir, Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, a collection of essays about her West Virginia childhood and the writers who influenced her. Phillips discussed the book and the role of place and influence in a recent interview tied to the memoir’s release (southcarolinapublicradio.org).
Jayne Anne Phillips is returning to print with *Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir*, a book of essays arriving April 21, 2026. (southcarolinapublicradio.org) Phillips discussed the memoir in an interview broadcast April 13, 2026, saying it draws on her childhood in Buckhannon, West Virginia, and on the writers who shaped her work. The interview aired through WBUR’s *Here & Now* and was republished by South Carolina Public Radio and other public radio outlets. (wbur.org, southcarolinapublicradio.org) The memoir follows Phillips’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she won for *Night Watch*. The Pulitzer board cited that novel’s West Virginia setting at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War. (pulitzer.org) That sequence matters for readers because Phillips is moving from a prize-winning historical novel back to autobiographical material rooted in the same state. Her publisher describes *Small Town Girls* as both a coming-of-age story and a work of social history. (pulitzer.org, penguinrandomhouse.com) Knopf lists the book at 208 pages and says Phillips reflects on memory, family, and the “place and people” that formed her as a writer. Penguin Random House is positioning it as one of the season’s notable literary releases ahead of publication next week. (books.google.com, penguinrandomhouse.com) Phillips has long tied her fiction to Appalachia, even when her stories ranged across different eras and subjects. Her author site says she was born in 1952 in Buckhannon, a small college and mining town, and describes the new book as her most personal work. (jayneannephillips.com) Her career stretches across six novels and two story collections, including *Black Tickets*, *Machine Dreams*, *Lark and Termite*, *Quiet Dell*, and *Night Watch*. The new memoir turns that literary history into subject matter, tracing not just where she came from but how reading and influence became part of her craft. (books.google.com, penguinrandomhouse.com) For now, the clearest through line is place: after winning a Pulitzer for a West Virginia novel, Phillips is publishing a memoir that returns to West Virginia as lived experience rather than fiction. The book reaches stores on April 21. (pulitzer.org, southcarolinapublicradio.org)
