Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974-

by Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Introduction)

Overview

My ignorance was on my side. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.

This collection of Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction writing, including early pieces from publications such as The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Ms., proves what her admirers have always known: from the start, she has been a consummate stylist, and she has always been herself.

From “Jamaica Kincaid’s New York,” which narrates her move to the city from Antigua at the age of sixteen and a half, to the classic “Biography of a Dress,” her cultural criticism, and her original thinking about the meaning of the garden, Kincaid writes about the world as she finds it, imparting her own quizzical, rapier-sharp response to whatever crosses her path.

Putting Myself Together is a brilliant, trenchant, hilarious self-portrait of the artist and a testament to how this inimitable, self-created mind and spirit, endowed with wit, humor, and fearlessness, has become one of our greatest, most original writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374613235
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

"Kincaid’s cutting prose shines, and the collection makes for a marvelous account of the author’s life and career. This is a triumph." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Putting Myself Together traces the shifts in Jamaica Kincaid’s preoccupations—from the intricacies of social dynamics to the verdant dynamics of a garden bed." —Maggie Lange, W Magazine

From the Publisher

2025-04-19
A writer’s sharp opinions.

Kincaid gathers more than 50 pieces of nonfiction—essays, introductions, memoir, and an interview with Athol Fugard—from 1973 to 2020, that reveal recurring themes: writing and gardening, friendship and family, and, most prominently, racism and colonialism. In her native Antigua, Kincaid grew up in a “colonial situation” that incited her ongoing “state of rage, rage, and more rage.” In school, she was shown a map of England, laid out “gently, beautifully, delicately, a very special jewel” situated “on a bed of sky blue”; the nation, she was made to believe, represented the pinnacle of culture. She read 19th-century English authors who depicted a society nothing like her own: “We understood then—we were meant to understand then—that England was to be our source of myth and the source from which we got our sense of reality, our sense of what was meaningful, our sense of what was meaningless—and much about our own lives and much about the very idea of us headed that last list.” It’s no wonder that when Kincaid first went to England, she hated it and everything about it. “The reality of my life was conquests, subjugation, humiliation, enforced amnesia,” she writes. Many essays reflect on colonial oppression. She can neither forgive nor forget those who treated humans like commodities and drained the wealth of the countries they dominated. “Have you ever wondered,” she asks, “why it is that all we seem to have learned from you is how to corrupt our societies and how to be tyrants?” In a different mood entirely are Kincaid’s essays on her friendship with Ian Frazier, her writing for theNew Yorker, her love for her children, and, always, gardening, a source of unequaled joy. Henry Louis Gates Jr. provides an appreciative introduction.

A spirited miscellany.

Kirkus Reviews