Forgive me this personal prelude, but a wave of memories came flooding back in the writing of this review that seems worth sharing. To begin: I grew up on the coast of Maine, where my home away from home was a grand old public library. It was in that library that I first discovered E.B. White wasn’t solely a writer of children’s books. My previous obliviousness to this fact ended when I happened upon a copy of One Man’s Meat, a collection of White’s writing from his New Yorker and Harper’s magazine days.

Surprised and curious, I picked it up and began reading. Two essays in, I’d hurtled past curious and moved head-on to totally hooked. White, the writer-for-grownups version, became my new favorite author — not just for his wit and lucid way with words, but also because of the how he so clearly adored my home state.

Flash-forward to 2023, when I was assigned to review Jayne Anne Phillips’ novel Night Watch. Since I wasn’t familiar with the author’s prior work, I did some internet sleuthing and learned that her latest historical novel was set in a time (the end of the Civil War) and place (the hills and hollows of West Virginia) that were both deeply embedded in her family’s lore. Indeed, many of Phillips’ ancestral highlights and low patches played out in those very hills and hollows. I was grateful to be able to review Night Watch with an appreciation for how deep the author’s ties are to her corner of West Virginia, both as a native daughter and a gifted chronicler.

And now, three years later, here I am again, gobsmacked by my latest assignment: a review of a writer’s memoir, Small Town Girls, by none other than Jayne Anne Phillips. In a delightful parallel of my childhood E.B. White experience, I once more found myself thrilled to encounter a stash of personal essays by a novelist I hold in high esteem.

Small Town Girls begins with descriptions of Phillips’ hometown, Buckhannon, and her family’s longtime connections to and livelihoods in the Allegheny Mountains. She provides an insightful historical overview, connecting the region’s verdant past, from “a thousand years of paradise for flora and fauna,” to its current beleaguered state, with its rivers poisoned and its forested topography scratched away — the result of a succession of assaults from timber milling and coal mining, strip mining and mountaintop mining, and finally, fracking. The chapter titled “Paradise Lost: West Virginia,” which weaves Phillips’ family chronology through the state’s centuries of downward spiral, should be required reading in every U.S. history class in America.

The book’s other chapter/essays shift between her coming-of-age memories of leaving home (and growing up along the way) to seemingly off-memoir social commentary, including a detailed account of the Hatfield/McCoy feud; a study of how female characters were portrayed in 1960s TV westerns; a discussion on the heartbreakingly familiar rituals that follow school shootings; and a detailed thesis on how and why Stephen Crane deserves credit for bending the arc of American fiction to embrace stories of the downtrodden.

One might wonder whether these chapters fit into the author’s narrative. But Phillips isn’t veering — she’s providing briefs on the subjects and experiences that form her creative bedrock. She writes to tell us not just who she is but how she got there.

If there’s one sturdy fiber wending its way through Small Town Girls, it’s Phillips’ relationship with her mother. Martha Jane Thornton Phillips is a presence on the first page and the last. She was her daughter’s most reliable repository of family history and local legends, and she was also a teacher at Phillips’ elementary school. Jayne clearly recognized that there was the woman who was her mother and also the woman who kept snacks in her desk drawer for hungry students and provided clean clothes and warm hand-me-downs for those who needed them (and who occasionally brought kids home at the end of the day, if necessary). Martha was a proud, generous, self-sufficient woman, and one can surmise that her daughter took her mother’s lessons of charity and self-reliance to heart.

Small Town Girls is a gift from beginning to end. As with my E.B. White awakening, the more you read of Jayne Anne Phillips, the gladder you’ll be to have picked up this book — and the more grateful you’ll be, mid-read, that there’s still more to come.

Kristin H. Macomber is a writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who started out as a small-town girl in Rockland, Maine.