Putting Myself Together
Writing 1974–
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE NEW STATESMAN AND THE TLS
A landmark collection of essays by the iconic writer Jamaica Kincaid.
'Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable' - Zadie Smith
‘An unaffectedly sumptuous, irresistible writer’ - Susan Sontag
‘What a writer' - Ali Smith
‘Both a daughter of Brontë and Woolf and her own inimitable self’ The Wall Street Journal
'If you are new to Kincaid, I envy you’ - Jackie Kay
That’s the way I write. It’s never going to stop. And the more it makes people annoyed the more I will do it.
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua in 1949. She has always been herself. Her work began to be published after she moved to New York at the age of nineteen, and by 1974 she was contributing to The New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column, where she later became a staff writer.
This is a blazing collection that spans more than five decades of Jamaica Kincaid’s writing. From Muhammad Ali, Diana Ross, gardening and motherhood, to colonialism and the act of writing, Putting Myself Together shows how this witty and fearless writer became one of the most remarkable and influential voices of a generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Kincaid (See Now Then) artfully touches on nature, womanhood, race, and identity in this stunning collection. In several essays, she pays tribute to her Antiguan American heritage and the women in her family who shaped her sense of self. For instance, in "Antigua Crossings," Kincaid draws an analogy between the unpredictable, inviting, dangerous, and beautiful Carribean Sea and how she felt at age 12 about "all the women" in her family. In "Biography of a Dress," she reflects on the lengths her mother went to in order to provide for her family despite economic restrictions and racial disparities, remembering a prevailing look of exhaustion in her mother's face that she, as a child, was too naive to recognize. Elsewhere, Kincaid meditates on The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir ("I will never read it again") and on her garden, a place she loves "very much—not as a refuge from all that is troubling and confounding about that general thing called life, but because all that is troubling about it, all that is confounding about it, is the source for me of multiple pleasures." Kincaid's cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account of the author's life and career. This is a triumph.
