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92NY’s Goldman Center for Children and Family provides an exceptional array of programs designed to support children at every stage of their development.
Jun 08, 2026
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jayne Anne Phillips turns her keen, unflinching eye to the charged terrain of girlhood — its intimacies, its silences, and its long afterlives — in a reading, short lecture, and conversation about her eagerly awaited new memoir, Small Town Girls — named Oprah’s #1 most anticipated book of 2026.
Jayne Anne Phillips grew up in small-town West Virginia. The distinctly American landscape of Appalachia — dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings — has been the great setting for her fiction. Tender, inviting, sparkling with wisdom and openheartedness, Small Town Girls is part coming-of-age story, part social history, and Jayne Anne Phillips’s most personal book yet — a love letter to the place and the people who have shaped her perceptions and her writing.
In an evening presented with Lit Girl, the Substack known for its cultishly smart themed syllabi, Phillips revisits her youth with tenderness and wisdom. Framed by Lit Girl’s recent syllabus, “Hell Is a Teenage Girl,” Phillips begins with a short lecture — part reflection, part reckoning — drawing connections between her own coming-of-age and the wider cultural scripts that shape (and misshape) young women’s lives.
Following the reading and lecture, take part in a conversation and audience Q&A moderated by Lit Girl. Hear a world-class writer tell the story of her upbringing — and the forces of youth that shape the rest of our lives.
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