The Autobiography of My Mother
by Jamaica Kincaid
List Price: $11.95
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0452274664
Publisher: Plume
In a life not unlike those she writes about, Elaine Potter Richardson
was born and raised on Antigua, a tiny island in the West Indies. Single-handedly
raised by her struggling mother, she never knew her biological father.
Brought up on a colonized island, Kincaid grew to harbor contempt toward
the British regime, leery of the control they had. Having grown distant
from her mother, she left home at 17 to become an au pair in New York,
dyed her hair blonde, and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. She broke
off all contact with her mother, took photography classes at the New School
and made new friends. A few years later she entered the literary world
with her first published article in Ingenue, an interview of Gloria
Steinem. This led to her writing music critiques for the Village Voice.
While accompanying a friend, George W.S. Trow, as he researched pieces
for the New Yorker column "Talk of the Town," she started
taking notes on events in the city. Trow passed her notes on to William
Shawn, then the editor of the New Yorker, who spotted her talent
and decided to print the notes as a piece. He went on to publish her first
piece of fiction, an emotionally intense one-page monologue called "Girl,"
in 1978. A year later, Kincaid married his son Allen Shawn, a composer.
She continued to write for the New Yorker until recently, when
she left, unhappy with changes brought on by the new editor. Her first
collection, At the Bottom of the River, was published in 1983,
and soon after she began gaining a following as one of the decade's most
notable new writers.
Often compared to other prominent
authors such as Toni Morrison and V.S. Naipaul, Kincaid has continued
to successfully produce acclaimed pieces of work, winning over critics
and audiences alike. At the Bottom of the River received the Morton
Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,
and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 1985 she published Annie
John, introducing readers to her unique and luminous prose that has
set her apart from other novelists. A Small Place (1988) and Lucy
(1991) followed shortly after. The Autobiography of My Mother,
which took Kincaid five years to write, has received wide recognition,
shooting to bestseller lists across the country, and is regarded as her
finest novel yet. When Kincaid is not busy raising her two children or
obsessing in her garden, her favorite pastime, she is teaching both fiction
writing and English at Harvard one semester a year.
Kincaid has risen from an economic
and racially challenged childhood to one of the most revered writers of
our time. Using her experience and passion, she writes moving and unsettling
stories about human suffering, politics, power, and the relationships
tying them together. She has said that she writes "to make sense
of it all" to herself, not directing her work at anyone in particular.
No matter, Kincaid's contribution to the literary world will no doubt
have an everlasting effect on those who read her work.
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