Small-Town Girl
Houghton Mifflin, 1983
My first. The main character is a baby poet. The poems she writes are my own–I’d thought, up to my early twenties, I’d be a poet.
But then I realized I was writing narrative poems in sentences, with semicolons and dialogue. I woke up to the fact I’m a sentence and paragraph person, not a line and stanza person. I started this novel as a way to postpone writing my M.A. thesis (on Virginia Woolf).
At first I was just sort of playing, because I was supposed to finish the master’s and go on for my Ph.D.–and novel-writing took me over. I finished the thesis, though.
Praise & Reviews
“An eloquent, often brilliant narrative.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A collage of scenes traces Colleen Dutton’s transition from child to young woman. The novel’s success at capturing the mood and flavor of a staunch Catholic upbringing in the 1960s is undeniable.”
—Booklist
“Sure to be the cornerstone of a remarkable career.”
—Publishers Weekly