AUTOBIOGRAPHY Of MY MOTHER, Signed 1st JAMAICA KINCAID

Autobiography
Of My Mother

by
Jamaica Kincaid

Published by Farrar Straus Giroux, copyright New York 1996, stated First Edition, Signed by the author on front end paper. Having 228 indexed pages, illustrated with images of mother, and photograph of author on back. Bound in cloth 5.5 by 8.25 inch hard covers, still in original dust jacket showing minor exterior wear, otherwise binding still internally tight and strong, contents clean and bright, and overall in very good condition.

(text taken from dust jacket...)

My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. JAMAICA KINCAID'S new novel is the haunting, deeply charged story of a woman's life on the island of Dominica. Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother and a half-Scottish, half African father, was delivered to his laundress as an infant, bundled up like his clothes: "It is possible that he would have expected better care for one than the other, but which one I do not know, because he was a very vain man."

Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea - "sometimes as a soft swish, a lapping of waves against the shore of black stones, sometimes with the anger of water boiling in a cauldron resting unsteadily on a large fire" - to the tinroofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack LaBatte, who becomes her first lover. We learn about her passion for Roland, a stevedore who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, and her eventual marriage to 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 deep sympathy for those who share her history, her fear of her father, her desperate loneliness. But underlying all is "the black room of the world" that is Xuela's barrenness and motherlessness.

The Autobiography of My Mother is a story of love, fear, loss, and the forging of a character, an account of one woman's inexorable evolution evoked in startling and magical poetry. Powerful, disturbing, stirring, it is Jamaica Kincaid's most remarkable work to date.

JAMAICA KINCAID was born in St. John's, Antigua. She is the author of several highly praised works of fiction: At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), and Lucy (1991), and the nonfiction work A Small Place (1988). She lives with her family in Vermont.
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