Book critic Michiko Kakutani of
The New York Times (12 June 1984) described Phillips as having stepped "out of the ranks of her generation as one of its most gifted writers," making her a writer to watch as the twenty-first century unfolds.
Phillips was born on 19 July 1952 in Buckhannon, West Virginia, to Martha Jane Thornhill Phillips, a schoolteacher, and Russell R. Phillips. She was raised with two brothers, one elder and one younger; their parents divorced in 1972, when Phillips was twenty. She reports having literary aspirations at the age of nine, when she wrote what she has described to Dorothy Combs Hill as a "kind of serial novel, starring myself and my friends, about a girl who moves to New York City and falls in love with a kid gang leader. I did that to entertain people." She grew up in a small West Virginia town characterized by many Southern attributes, not the least of which was the propensity of its citizens to share stories. In the Hill article, Phillips described her experience as a child in a town where her family had lived for almost three hundred years:
everyone knew everyone's stories, but the stories were secret.
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