In Praise of Pulitzer Prize-Winner Jayne Anne Phillips

Jayne Anne Phillips exploded onto the American literary landscape with Black Tickets , a short story collection that remains so compellingly singular that it ought to function as a handbook for short story writers. It was published in 1979, but I didn’t know of it or read any of its electric stories until some 25 years later. I was in my twenties and floundering around New York City, dreaming about writing and publishing a book. I’d grown up in rural West Virginia, a gay kid who’d run away to the big city for freedom and possibility. I found myself desperate for books that felt personally instructive, that at least nodded to the kind of world I’d come from. I searched the Internet for writers from my home state and found Phillips. I bought a used copy of the paperback of Black Tickets with yellowed, marked-up pages, and a tattered blue-and-black cover that looked to my eyes vaguely like a work of pulp. I wasn’t ready for how this book would change me. I felt this slam reading Phillips’ work, an uncanny feeling that someone had done something new with the English language. “My mother’s ankles curve from the hem of a white suit as if the bones were water,” Phillips writes to open “Wedding Picture,” a short fiction at the front of Black Tickets . Her style emerges from an expert control of the line—a tight and often lyric arrangement of words that seems to reconfigure the possibility of a sentence. Fleshy is the word that comes to mind when I think of Phillips’ writing—bodies and action and sensory intertwined. Her taut style is effective because it serves the substance of the narrative. I feel her words and characters and yearnings viscerally. The milieu of Phillips’ six novels and two story collections is West Virginia, family, and a fair amount of war. I never had interest in being a war writer. I was interested in battles closer to home; I’d become estranged from my family when they couldn’t accept the fact that I was gay. It turned out that […]

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