The Autobiography of My Mother: A Novel (FSG Classics)

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age."My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity," writes Jamaica Kincaid in this disturbing, compelling novel set on the island of Dominica.“Fierce, incantatory... lyrical... powerful and disturbing.” - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesXuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth and the accompanying death of her mother. Xuela's vivid, visceral recollections of the lonely, unsettled life that follows the trauma of her arrival include that of her distant father, who sends her away to another household at the earliest opportunity; of her passion for the stevedore Roland, who fulfils her sexually but not intellectually; and of her husband, who provides her with status and a wealthy lifestyle but whom she is incapable of loving.“Kincaid, always an elegant stylist, makes this story of a simple woman extraordinary... filling her prose with rich, poetic detail... An unforgettable account of singular survival.” - San Francisco Chronicle Book Review“A book that comes both to haunt and to dazzle us... [Kincaid] writes like an angel: with enviable lucidity and precision and a lyric touch that frequently aspires to the condition of poetry.” - Boston Sunday GlobePoetic and disturbing, The Autobiography Of My Mother is one of Jamaica Kincaid's most powerful statements of Afro-Caribbean women's struggle for identity and independence, against a hostile backdrop of sexism and colonialism.

From the recipient of the 2010 Clifton Fadiman Medal, an unforgettable novel of one woman's courageous coming-of-age

Jamaica Kincaid's 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, Jamaica Kincaid's novel is the 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, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own.

Kincaid takes us from Xuela's childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries 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.

Powerful, disturbing, stirring, Jamaica Kincaid s novel is the 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, loses her mother to death the moment she is born and must find her way on her own. Kincaid takes us from Xuela s childhood in a home where she could hear the song of the sea to the tin-roofed room where she lives as a schoolgirl in the house of Jack Labatte, who becomes her first lover. Xuela develops a passion for the stevedore Roland, who steals bolts of Irish linen for her from the ships he unloads, but she eventually marries 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. The West Indian narrator vents her bitterness at the unhappy life fate dealt her--mother died in childbirth, father ignored her, stepmother tried to kill her, at school she had an abortion. Finally, she married a white doctor, but it was impossible for her to love him because he was a colonialist. She draws parallels with the despair of her country--Dominica--attributing it to the legacy of slavery. By the author of Lucy. After growing up without a mother Xuela Claudette Richardson again finds herself imagining what the woman might have been like and how her own life might have turned out different had her mother not died