The terrace that starts at the back door ends in a border of stones the lawn, planted with thousands of daffodils, slopes down to a thickly shaded creek. The study where she writes is a sunroom surrounded on three sides by windows. She has two children from her marriage to the composer Allen Shawn, the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn, and in the living room she displays on a table-proudly, apologetically-productions from the arts-and-crafts camps and classes that her son and daughter attended over the years.
Kincaid divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of African American studies at Harvard University, and Bennington, Vermont, where her large brown clapboard house with yellow window trim is shielded by trees. Aside from the collected Talk Stories (2001), her nonfiction works include A Small Place (1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua My Brother (1997), a memoir of the tragedy of AIDS in her family and two books on gardening, My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005). A children’s book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, came out in 1986. She has published the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes, her style, the uncanny purity of her prose. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In time, she put herself on another path. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. Interview still frame courtesy of Stephanie Black. In her study at home in North Bennington, 2018. It was a bit like being on acid,” he said, dipping his paintbrush again in the dish, “if I can cast my mind back that far.” Suddenly they all started looking like that. What’s a baby doing sitting on my sofa shoving coke up his nose? And once I’d started seeing it that way, I couldn’t stop. “It must have been the combination of the baldness and the funny face that did it. “He had this funny, pudgy little face,” Dale said, pausing with his paintbrush in the air. He started at the root but became more meticulous the further away from it he got, as though he had learned to resist the temptation to concentrate his labors there at the beginning. I watched the way he distributed the paste all along the strand in even strokes. He unclipped a new section and began to paint it. I don’t know what it was about him,” Dale said. I suddenly just felt really sorry for him.
He was sitting there doing lines that he’d laid out all neatly for himself on the coffee table.
He stirred the paintbrush in the dish, coating each side again carefully with the brown paste. “I was sitting there on my sofa,” he said, “and it just suddenly happened.” “I just suddenly couldn’t be bothered,” he said.įor a long time he didn’t reply, painting the strands of hair one after another until I thought he either hadn’t heard my question or was choosing to ignore it. When everyone had their coats on, he announced that he’d decided to stay at home. They were getting ready to go out, and he starting thinking about the fact that he hated it and thinking that everyone else probably hated it, too, but that no one was prepared to say so. That was part of it, realizing that I bloody hated New Year’s Eve.”Ī group of them had been at his flat, he said. “I had a road to Damascus moment,” he said. “It’s something to do with a road,” he said. I said I wasn’t sure: a few different words sprang to mind. “What’s it called,” Dale said, “when you have one of those bloody great blinding flashes of insight that changes the way you look at things?”
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