Jayne Anne Phillips
Biographical Information
Jayne Anne Phillips was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia, in July of 1952. After high school, Phillips enrolled at West Virginia University, earning a B.A. in 1974. During the mid-1970's, Phillips undertook a trip destined to forever effect her life and her writing. She left West Virginia for California, embarking on a wandering cross-country trip that would lead to numerous jobs and experiences and encounters with the broad spectrum of humanity--truly the good, the bad, and the ugly. The people and experiences from this trip would later emerge as the lost souls and struggling survivors for which her fiction is so known. Before that would happen, though, she entered the University of Iowa, completing her M.F.A. in 1978. In between those degrees, in 1976, Truck Press published her first short story collection Sweethearts. This small press collection earned Phillips the Pushcart Prize and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Fels Award.
Sweethearts was followed two years later with a second small press collection, Counting, published in 1978 by Vehicle Press. This collection earned Phillips more recognition and the St. Lawrence award. But it was her next short story collection which would truly garner national attention and commercial success.
Black Tickets, published by Delacorte in 1979, contained three types of stories -- brief character studies, inner soliloquies, and family dramas. These stories embody the hallmark of Phillips' fiction -- alienation, family tension, sexual alienation, and the usually-unsuccessful search for happiness and the American dream. The collection received outstanding critical reviews and marked Phillips as a strong voice in modern American fiction.
Five years after Black Tickets, Jayne Anne Phillips published her first novel, Machine Dreams. The novel is a family chronicle, tracing the lives and fortunes of the Hampton family in the years between World War II and Vietnam. Slowly, seen from each family member's perspective, the family disintegrates; its tragic collapse mirroring the descent into chaos of the society around them. Critics praised Machine Dreams for its scope, the power of its language, and for its subtle commentary on the dissolution of the American dream.
Phillips returned to short stories after Machine Dreams, publishing Fast Lanes in 1984. Like Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes deals with the discontinuity of modern life and isolation from the past. While still well received, most critics felt Fast Lanes suffered in comparison to Machine Dreams. Fast Lanes is a collection of seven original stories, along with three that had been previously published. Each story is a first person narrative, offering glimpses into the lives of a generation of Americans - full of emotion and power.
In August 1995, Phillips published her second novel, Shelter. Shelter is a portrait of the loss of innocence, of children at a West Virginia girls' camp in the summer of 1963 who must face an unexpected rite of passage -- one of violence, love, and family secrets. One critic, writing in Harper's Bazaar, described Shelter as a "defiant, frighteningly beautiful novel…as disturbing as its setting."
After Shelter, Phillips would not publish another novel for nearly seven years. Published in April 2000, MotherKind is Jayne Anne Phillips' third novel. It is the story of Kate, who must care for her terminally ill mother while also facing the birth of her first child and adjusting to the early months of a young marriage. It is a story of first and second families, stepchildren, neighbors, babysitters, and friends. Kate must define for herself home and family, and discover who to translate who she has been into who she will become. MotherKind is the pinnacle of Phillips' family chronicles, exploring the nature of the mother-daughter relationship and the bonds of family across generations that even culture, time, and death cannot truly break.
Jayne Anne Phillips has held teaching positions at several colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Williams College, and Boston University, and is currently Fiction-Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University. She and her husband, physician Mark Stockman, have three sons.
Critical Responses
Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani commented about Jayne Anne Phillips "Her quick, piercing tales of love and loss [demonstrate] a keen love of language, and a rare talent of illuminating the secret core of ordinary lives with clear-sighted unsentimentality." In one sentence, Kakutani managed to capture nearly the whole of the critical response to Jayne Anne Phillips -- a focus on love and loss, ordinary lives, and the unsentimental nature of her work.
Jayne Anne Phillips has titled herself a "family chronicler," an author whose depictions of family tensions and relationships --love and loss-- have earned tremendous critical response. The families she chronicles are not the happy homes of 1950s sitcoms, nor are they the utter chaos and dysfunctionality of Peg and Al Bundy. Instead, the families she creates are real -- with real tension, real pain, and real love. They might not triumph, but they will survive. Thomas R. Edwards has commented in The New York Review of Books that her characters are "more or less ordinary people, in families, who are trying to love each other across a gap." Edwards goes on to state that "Phillips wonderfully captures the tones and gestures in which familial love unexpectedly persists even after altered circumstances have made [that love] impossible to express directly."
In addition to her portrayals of families, Phillips has also garnered critical praise for her depictions of society's misfits--those struggling to survive outside of the mainstream. Despite the outcast nature of their existence, these characters still lead "ordinary lives"--struggling to find the same peace and personal happiness for which the mainstream strives, yet kept from their dreams by the circumstances of their lives. These stories, found largely in Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, are character explorations, often in the form of dramatic monologues. Commenting on Black Tickets in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook 1980, Michael Adams noted that "Phillips explores the banality of horror and the horror of the banal through her examination of sex, violence, innocence, loneliness, illness, madness, various forms of love and lovelessness." Hope often seems far away or out of place in these troubled lives; instead what her characters have is an inner strength born of adversity that keeps them moving forward, even if the future looks as dark as the past.
In 1984, Jayne Anne Phillips published her first novel, Machine Dreams. Focusing on a struggling West Virginia family in the years between World War II and the Vietnam Conflict, Machine Dreams was a brilliant success. Critics praised the novel, both for its excellent plot and characters and for its analysis of political and social realities and its critique of the myth of the American dream. Other critics noted the power of Phillips' prose and her command of the difficult writing style of using multiple points of view. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Anne Tyler commented, "the novel's shocks arise from small, ordinary moments, patiently developed, that suddenly burst out with far more meaning than we had expected. And each of these moments owes its impact to an assured and gifted writer."
Shelter, the novel published after Machine Dreams, is a much smaller book, both in size and in scope, but one with great power and force. It is the story of children in a 1963 West Virginia girls' camp who face an unexpected rite of passage, one that will leave deep scars on the future of their young lives. Publisher's Weekly called Shelter "a dark, richly imagined story of evil confronting innocence," and praised Phillips' visual imagery and sense of drama -- affirming her as a master of her craft. Most critics confirmed Shelter as a literary tour de force -- Harpers Bazaar called it "Phillips' bid for immortality."
After Shelter, it would be seven years before Jayne Anne Phillips published another novel. With MotherKind, she returned her focus to the family, to the ties that bind and unravel. It is the story of Kate, a young woman who must deal with a new marriage, a new baby, and her mother's terminal illness, all within a matter of a few months. It is the quintessential story of the modern American woman, struggling to balance the competing needs of parents and children, of family and self; yet its themes of home, family, and the ties that bind are timeless and true. Many have praised MotherKind as Phillips' best novel; one reviewer described it as "a delicately layered narrative in which the details of daily life resonate with import and meaning."
In their book Passion and Craft, Bonnie Lyons and Bill Oliver comment that Jayne Anne Phillips writes about family, unique individuals, and the questioning of the possibilities and the value of the American dream. She offers her readers a glimpse into the lives of those who might never reach that elusive dream, but who manage to survive on their own terms anyway.
Works Published
Novels
Machine Dreams
Shelter
MotherKindStory Collections
Sweethearts
Counting
How Mickey Made It
The Secret Country
Black Tickets
Fast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips has also published numerous articles and essays and has had many stories anthologized. Please see Jayne Anne Phillips Online for a partial bibliography or ask a librarian for assistance.
Selected Bibliography
Aiken, Susan Hardy. Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges Between (ex) Soviet and American Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.
Capper, Nicholas. Jayne Anne Phillips: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography 1976-1989. Bulletin of Bibliography. 47:3, September 1990. pp. 75-84.
Douglass, Thomas E. Jayne Anne Phillips. Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review. 21:2, Winter 1994. pp. 182-89.
Folks, Jeffrey J. and Nancy Summer Folks, eds. The World is Our Culture: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing. Albany, NY: UP of Kentucky, 2000.
Houser, Catherine. Missing in Action: Alienation in the Fiction of Award-Winning Women Writers. Mid-Atlantic Review. 14:2, 1994. pp. 33-39.
Lyons, Bonnie and Bill Oliver, eds. Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois Press, 1998.
Manning, Carol S. The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1993.
Meredith, Sue Willis. Witness to the Nightmare Country. Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review. 24:1, Fall 1996. pp. 44-51.
Price, Johanna. Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing. Journal of American Studies. 27:2, August 1993. pp. 173-86.
Sheppard, R.Z. Southern Gothic, 90s Style. Time. September 19, 1994. pp. 33-34.
Author Website
Jayne Anne Phillips Online -- http://www.jayneannephillips.com/