The Autobiography of My Mother - (FSG Classics) by Jamaica Kincaid (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution, evoked in startling and magical prose.

This novel tells the deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, the daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half-African father, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.

Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she can hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries an English doctor, Philip Bailey. Xuela's is an intensely physical world, redolent of overripe fruit, gentian violet, sulfur, and rain on the road, and it seethes with her sorrow, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness, and her deep sympathy for those who share her history. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's motherlessness and barrenness.

Review Quotes

"Fierce, incantory . . . lyrical . . . powerful and disturbing." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Kincaid, always an elegant stylist, makes this story of a simple woman extraordinary . . . filling her prose with rich, poetic detail . . . An unforgettable account of singular survival." --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A book that comes both to haunt and to dazzle us . . . [Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry." --Boston Sunday Globe

About the Author