Jamaica Kincaid: writing memory, writing back to the mother

When you think of me, think of my life

I had embarked on something called self-invention : artistic beginnings in "Antigua crossings" and At the bottom of the river

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

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

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"

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

I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have : remembering her brother's failed life in My brother

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.