Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 on the Caribbean island of Antigua. She attended school in Antigua and struggled to become independent of her mother and her place. “I was supposed to be full of good manners and good speech,” she has recalled. “Where the hell I was going to go with it I don’t know.” Kincaid took it to New York City, where she went at age seventeen to work as a family helper. She briefly attended Franconia College on a photography scholarship and did odd jobs in New York. She started contributing to The New Yorker, and in 1976 became a staff writer. Soon after, she began writing fiction, producing a collection of stories and five novels—all based to some extent on her life on Antigua and as an immigrant. Her nonfiction books include A Small Place (1988), also about Antigua; My Brother (1997), a National Book Award finalist; and Talk Stories (2000), a collection of her pieces from The New Yorker. An avid gardener, Kincaid has also written My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2004). She is a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
In this very short story collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983) and read by the author for the Audio Prose Library, Kincaid analyzes the domain of the title female—both the roles she is expected to fill and the relationship with her mother, whose commanding, hectoring voice fills the story.
Download the transcript.
Listen to “Girl,” and respond to the following questions.