Jamaica Kincaid

J. Brooks Bouson is Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, also published by SUNY Press; Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood; and The Empathic Reader: A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self.

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. "When You Think of Me, Think of My Life" Part I. In the Shadow of the Mother 2. "I Had Embarked on Something Called Self-Invention" Artistic Beginnings in "Antigua Crossings" and At the Bottom of the River 3. "The Way I Became a Writer Was That My Mother Wrote My Life for Me and Told It to Me": Living in the Shadow of the Mother in Annie John 4. "As I Looked at This Sentence a Great Wave of Shame Came over Me and I Wept and Wept": The Art of Memory, Anger, and Despair in Lucy Part II. A Very Personal Politics 5. "Imagine the Bitterness and the Shame in Me as I Tell You This": The Political Is Personal in A Small Place and "On Seeing England for the First Time" Part III. Family Portraits 6."I Would Bear Children, but I Would Never Be a Mother to Them": Writing Back to the Contemptuous Mother in The Autobiography of My Mother 7. "I Shall Never Forget Him Because His Life Is the One I Did Not Have": Remembering Her Brother's Failed Life in My Brother 8. "Like Him and His Own Father before Him, I Have a Line Drawn through Me": Imagining the Life of the Absent Father in Mr. Potter 9. Conclusion. "I Am Writing for Solace": Seeking Solace in Writing, Gardening, and Domestic Life Notes Works Cited Index