Jamaica Kincaid on “Putting Myself Together”

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. All manner of writers have graced the pages of The New Yorker in the past century, including many of the greatest prose stylists of our time.

But it's very rare to find one who nailed their unique voice right off the bat the way Jamaica Kincaid did. It was 1974, when Jamaica first began writing for this magazine, reporting about life in New York, very often for the Talk of the Town section. She was a young immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua. Kincaid started writing with a wit and a particular bite about the world she had entered. She went on to write about her family, about Antigua, about how people from the Caribbean see Americans next door.

She wrote about the dissolution of a marriage, about gardening, which she took up with extraordinary passion. She once said, Everything I write is autobiographical, but none of it is true in the sense of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie. The truth, on the other hand, is complicated.

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