Girl and Woman
Document Type: Critical essay, Interview
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(interview date 1 January 1996) In the following interview, Kreilkamp provides an overview of Kincaid 's life and literary career upon the publication of The Autobiography of My Mother, and Kincaid comments on her relationship with the New Yorker, publishing, and gardening.]
A teenage girl in the mid-1960s abandons her home on Antigua, a tiny island in the West Indies, bound for New York and not to return home for 19 years. She becomes an au pair for a family in Scarsdale, N.Y., then for a different family in New York City. She breaks off all contact with her mother, takes photography courses at the New School, dyes her hair blonde and changes her name. A few years later, in her early 20s, she convinces Ingenue, a girls ' magazine, to allow her to interview Gloria Steinem. The article is a success, and soon she 's writing pop music criticism for the Village Voice and "Talk of the Town" pieces for the New Yorker. She writes her first work of fiction--"Girl"--a hectoring monologue in the voice of her mother, which is published in 1978 as one incandescent page in the New Yorker. By the time her first collection is published in 1983, she 's being hailed as one of the most important new fiction writers of the decade.
Jamaica Kincaid 's life story sounds a bit like a cross between Charlotte Bronte 's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys 's Wide Sargasso Sea, except in this version, the woman from the West Indies triumphs, working her way through governess jobs to become a renowned author. Her biography also sounds more than a bit like one of her own novels, because, as Kincaid puts it, with characteristic irony, "everything in my writing is autobiographical--down to the punctuation."
The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid 's third novel (and fifth book) with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, adds a dazzling new chapter to the ongoing
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(interview date 1 January 1996) In the following interview, Kreilkamp provides an overview of Kincaid 's life and literary career upon the publication of The Autobiography of My Mother, and Kincaid comments on her relationship with the New Yorker, publishing, and gardening.]
A teenage girl in the mid-1960s abandons her home on Antigua, a tiny island in the West Indies, bound for New York and not to return home for 19 years. She becomes an au pair for a family in Scarsdale, N.Y., then for a different family in New York City. She breaks off all contact with her mother, takes photography courses at the New School, dyes her hair blonde and changes her name. A few years later, in her early 20s, she convinces Ingenue, a girls ' magazine, to allow her to interview Gloria Steinem. The article is a success, and soon she 's writing pop music criticism for the Village Voice and "Talk of the Town" pieces for the New Yorker. She writes her first work of fiction--"Girl"--a hectoring monologue in the voice of her mother, which is published in 1978 as one incandescent page in the New Yorker. By the time her first collection is published in 1983, she 's being hailed as one of the most important new fiction writers of the decade.
Jamaica Kincaid 's life story sounds a bit like a cross between Charlotte Bronte 's Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys 's Wide Sargasso Sea, except in this version, the woman from the West Indies triumphs, working her way through governess jobs to become a renowned author. Her biography also sounds more than a bit like one of her own novels, because, as Kincaid puts it, with characteristic irony, "everything in my writing is autobiographical--down to the punctuation."
The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid 's third novel (and fifth book) with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, adds a dazzling new chapter to the ongoing
Bibliography: Bloom, Harold, ed. Jamaica Kincaid: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1998. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. "Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview." In Selwyn R. Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994. Vorda, Allan. " 'I Come from a Place That 's Very Unreal ' : An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid. "In Allan Vorda, ed., Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, pp. 77-105. Houston: Rice University Press, 1993.