Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips has released "Small Town Girls," a memoir of 22 linked autobiographical essays celebrating her upbringing in Buckhannon, a small town in the Allegheny Mountains of north-central West Virginia. The collection draws on her childhood in the 1950s and 1960s to explore how the region's landscapes, family histories, and community rituals shaped her into a writer, while also challenging what she describes as the stereotypes of deprivation that have long shadowed Appalachia. Phillips, best known for her 2023 Pulitzer-winning novel "Night Watch," uses the memoir to reflect on the environmental toll of industries such as coal mining and fracking on the region she calls "the perfect birthplace for a writer."