Review: 'Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–' by Jamaica Kincaid

To my great shame I must admit I hadn't read anything by Jamaica Kincaid before this collection. I had heard of her, even had a book or two of hers on my To Read-List, and yet I hadn't gotten around to it. I don't know why, but when I saw this collection of her non-fiction writing, I figured it would be a great entry into Kincaid's mind and writing. And it was! Thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for giving me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 05/08/2024
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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.

Not every fiction author is also a good non-fiction writer. Both non-fiction and fiction rely on a strong authorial voice, on the successful creation of a storyworld, and an ability to keep a reader hooked, but these elements can work in drastically different ways depending on the genre and the goal of the text. I have found it quite interesting to approach a fiction author through their non-fiction writing first, to see how they describe our primary world, what their thoughts are, and how they put those into words, before diving into their fictional writing. I did this with Ursula K. Le Guin as well, falling in love with her writing in No Time to Spare before finally reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World is Forest. I know that, in theory, the author is dead (as in, the author figure, see Roland Barthes), and usually I'm quite big on separating author and art. But sometimes the person and the life they have lived can enrich a reading experience, or perhaps add an extra layer of understanding to your reading. This is how I chose to approach Jamaica Kincaid as well, seeing our own world through her eyes first and then following her into her fictional creations.

There are too many pieces of writing in Putting Myself Together to even attempt a rough summary of it all. So rather, I'll address some of the recurrent themes which stood out to me. One was, very clearly, her connection to Antigua and Barbuda, where she was born and lived for the first seventeen years of her life. Her experiences under colonial rule, how the imposed British education system worked on her, how she loved so much about Antigua and about her family, and yet how desperate she was to get away, it all comes out very strongly in her writing and you can trace how these things change and develop for her across the decades covered by the writings collected here. This is also tightly connected to her relationship with her mother, which is marked by intense love and ever-growing distance and dislike. I admire Kincaid for her honesty in how she excavates these complicated feelings in herself, the push-and-pull of a mother-daughter relationship, complicated by the world, sons/brothers, and everything else. In the later writings, when her mother has dies and Kincaid has children of her own, there is a touching new awareness in her writing about it, which doesn't lessen what came before but rather gives its extra depth. Her experiences under colonialism also informs her writing about racism in its various forms and I did have to say I delighted somewhat cruelly in her strong distaste for England. Another major theme is her gardening, which naturally entails conversations not just of tulip types and the best time to plant and water, but also considerations on colonialism, who owns the earth, the joy of watching something grow, the patience and submission to nature required of gardening, and more. I discovered the joy of gardening myself a year or two back and so really enjoyed reading Kincaid's thoughts on it.

In his introduction to this volume, Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that Kincaid "has a sense of what it takes to become a person, to put yourself together. Becoming is an act of invention, tested by the real". (Quote may differ in published version.) This ended up also being what stood out to me most clearly from Kincaid's writing. She communicates the way in which we are shaped by the outside world, yes, but also the way in which we can choose what we put on, how we put ourselves together, which things we accept and which we don't. That process of becoming is an invention, yes, but it is based on actual insights into the real world, on sharply dissecting not just the world but also one's self. Kincaid spares no one and nothing, including herself, in these pieces and I truly do think that it is only in this way that one can become as unflinchingly oneself the way Kincaid seems to have done. Naturally, with a collection that spans decades the way Putting Myself Together does, there are bound to be pieces that hit and those that don't. I imagine editing the collection would have been difficult, trying to find that fine line between showing growth and development and preventing repetition of themes. It is probably best to read this in various sittings, dropping in for a story or two and letting them cook, rather than reading it all in one or two goes. Whether you're already a Kincaid-reader or, like me, are new-ish to her, I can recommend Putting Myself Together for the insight not just into a person but into an author as well.

I give this collection...

4 Universes!

Putting Myself Together is a fascinating look inside Kincaid's mind, into how she sees the world and the way she and the world interacted to make her who she is.