Beneath the Still Surface of a Small Town: An Exclusive Guest Post from Adrienne Young, Author of The Unmaking of June Farrow

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live in a small town. I grew up in a large, not so charming suburb outside of Dallas, Texas, but we spent many of our holidays and summer vacations in a tiny town called Alba about an hour and a half away. The population of Alba is less than five hundred people, with expansive fenced pastures dotted with bales of hay and little farmhouses with porches and gravel drives. This was the setting that served as a backdrop to my very wild imagination as a child, and I remember very vividly what it was like to dream there. I’d be walking in an old graveyard barefoot with dragonflies dancing or explore an old barn I wasn’t supposed to be in with fantastical stories spinning in my head about ghosts and curses and legends galore. 

For years, I maintained that when I graduated high school, I would move into my great grandmother’s house there and live a quiet, idyllic life with the cows and wildflowers that line the black tar roads. I’d never been one to dream of moving to New York City or having a splashy, public life, and I think that’s partly just who I am and also because my fondest, warmest memories take place in the country. 

I find comfort in the familiar. The quaintness of a general store that knows your name or a coffee shop you go into every morning where they remember your order is magic to me. Even now, those types of environments ignite ideas in me that fill the notebooks in my office. But there’s something a little unsettling about it too. I see strangers and find myself wondering who they really are. What they really want. What they’re afraid of. The added complexity of the small-town setting deepens those questions. Who did they used to be? What made them afraid? 

The truly fascinating thing about a small town is the length of proximity people have to one another. In a world that is increasingly globalized and generations of people who are more nomadic than ever, it’s easy and even common to start over and recreate yourself. But sharing a history with people is something different. When individuals grow and change, evolving from one phase to the next, it’s the people of your past who remember the previous versions of you. To live among those mirrors is a tricky thing, and to know each other’s secrets is even more complicated. I am convinced that everyone has at least one real secret, and for many of us, they will stay quietly buried in the past. But beneath the still surface of a small town exists very deep, ever churning waters, where whispers never quite die down and memories never fully fade. There are an infinite number of stories to be told there, and I have every intention of continuing to write them.