Jamaica Kincaid

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. "When You Think of Me, Think of My Life"

Part I. In the Shadow of the Mother

2. "I Had Embarked on Something Called Self-Invention" Artistic Beginnings in "Antigua Crossings" and At the Bottom of the River

3. "The Way I Became a Writer Was That My Mother Wrote My Life for Me and Told It to Me": Living in the Shadow of the Mother in Annie John

4. "As I Looked at This Sentence a Great Wave of Shame Came over Me and I Wept and Wept": The Art of Memory, Anger, and Despair in Lucy

Part II. A Very Personal Politics

5. "Imagine the Bitterness and the Shame in Me as I Tell You This": The Political Is Personal in A Small Place and "On Seeing England for the First Time"

Part III. Family Portraits

6."I Would Bear Children, but I Would Never Be a Mother to Them": Writing Back to the Contemptuous Mother in The Autobiography of My Mother

7. "I Shall Never Forget Him Because His Life Is the One I Did Not Have": Remembering Her Brother's Failed Life in My Brother

8. "Like Him and His Own Father before Him, I Have a Line Drawn through Me": Imagining the Life of the Absent Father in Mr. Potter

9. Conclusion. "I Am Writing for Solace": Seeking Solace in Writing, Gardening, and Domestic Life

Notes

Works Cited

Index