JAMAICA KINCAID was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949 in St. Johns, Antigua, in the West Indies. As Kincaid’s mother had more children, the once-close relationship between mother and daughter became strained, and Kincaid began to feel increasingly restricted by life in Antigua under British rule. At seventeen, she left Antigua to work as an au pair in New York, where she attended night classes and began working as a freelance writer. At the start of her writing career, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid to shed the “weights” (as she put it) of her past life. Kincaid’s stories have appeared in such prestigious venues as Rolling Stone, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker, where she became a staff writer in 1978. “Girl” was published first in the New Yorker and later in Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River (1984), an anthology of short stories that won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award. Her next book, Annie John (1985), also a collection of stories, centered on a girl growing up in the West Indies. In addition to two novels—Lucy (1990) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996)—Kincaid has published two books of nonfiction: My Brother (1997), the story of her brother Devon Drew’s short life, and A Small Place (2000), an examination of her native Antigua. Kincaid now makes her home in Vermont, where her husband is a composer and professor of music at Bennington College.

As you listen to “Girl,” notice the rhythms of the language, and consider how the almost poetic litany of instructions reflects and shapes the reader’s understanding of the relationship between mother and daughter.

Listen to Jamaica Kincaid reading “Girl.”

Courtesy of American Audio Prose Library, Inc.

Source: Jamaica Kincaid, Girl (audio recording): Courtesy of American Audio Prose Library, Inc.