20/04/2020 Jamaica Kincaid - Wikipedia

Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe,
and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things.
The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't
have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.[5]

In a New York Times interview, Kincaid also said: "The way I became a writer was that my mother
wrote my life for me and told it to me."[7]

Kincaid was educated in the British colonial education system, as Antigua did not gain independence
from England until 1981.[3][5][8] Although she was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her
class, Kincaid's mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family when her third and
last brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could not provide for the family any more.[5]
In 1966, when Kincaid was 17, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City,
to work as an au pair.[9] After this move, when Kincaid refused to send money home, "she left no
forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".[10]

Family

In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor Allen Shawn, son of
longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of actor Wallace Shawn. The couple
divorced in 2002. They have two children: a son, Harold, the music producer/songwriter
Levelsoundz, a graduate of Northeastern University; and a daughter, Annie, who graduated from
Harvard and now works in marketing. Kincaid is president of the official Levelsoundz Fan Club.

Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject. She is a convert to Judaism.[11]

Career overview

While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college.[12] After
three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full
scholarship. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York.[3] In New York City, she started
writing for a teenage girls' magazine. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, when her
writing was first published.[13] She described this name change as "a way for [her] to do things
without being the same person who couldn't do them — the same person who had all these
weights".[14] Kincaid explained that "Jamaica" is an English corruption of what Columbus called
Xaymaca, the part of the world that she comes from, and "Kincaid" appeared to go well with
"Jamaica".[15] Kincaid became a writer for The Village Voice and Ingénue. Her short fiction appeared
in The Paris Review, and in The New Yorker, where her novel Lucy was originally serialized.[16]

Kincaid is an award-winning writer, whose work has been both praised and criticized for its subject
matter because it largely draws upon her own life, and her tone is often perceived as angry.[12]
Kincaid counters that many writers draw upon personal experience, so to describe her writing as
autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.[4] Jamaica Kincaid was named the 50th
commencement speaker at Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2019.[17]

The New Yorker

As a result of her budding writing career and friendship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many
pieces for The New Yorker column "The Talk of the Town",[3][18] Kincaid became acquainted with
New Yorker editor William Shawn, who was impressed with her writing.[12] He employed her as a
staff writer in 1976 and eventually as a featured columnist for Talk of the Town for nine years.[12]

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