“I didn’t want anyone else to look like me,” says Jamaica Kincaid, laughing. It’s a long-standing refrain in a meandering conversation on a recent afternoon in August. The discussion takes place via phone ahead of the paperback release of Putting Myself Together, a career-spanning collection of her essays. In conversation, the same wryness, irreverence, and piercing desire to question comes through — even over a crackling connection threatened by a summer storm outside her door in Vermont.
Kincaid got her start as a writer for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section in the 1970s. She had come from Antigua to work as a domestic, but in one of those twists in life that seem magical now but were commonplace in the energetic world of New York in the ’70s, she fell in with the writer George S. Trow, who introduced her writing to the legendary editor William Shawn.
Kincaid wrote observations, reviews, and personal essays at the magazine. Her novels Annie John, Lucy, and The Autobiography of My Mother became classics of late-20th-century literature, while her essay collection exploring the violence of tourism in the Caribbean, A Small Place, became a classic of postcolonial writing.
Kincaid has never pulled punches and, in conversation, is boisterous and quick to laugh. Here, she talks about her early days as a writer and the ways fashion and personal style helped define her identity as an artist.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length.
I wanted to talk a little bit about creating a persona, because this book is called Putting Myself Together and the theme of so many of the pieces in it is the construction of self. There’s a piece in there all about this, through the lens of Diana Ross. Do you think of your life as an author as one of personas?
No. I mean, it certainly wasn’t conscious.
I came to America as a servant girl. I’ve always wanted to write, but I didn’t know that one did that. When I think about it, I don’t know what I would’ve done with this sort of interest, with the kind of curiosity I had. I don’t know what I would’ve done without writing. But I didn’t know that you could do it in public or you could let people know what you are thinking. But when you say “constructing yourself,” I must have been doing that. The Diana Ross piece … I haven’t reread any of the pieces in the book because they frighten me.
What frightens you?
That I was so arrogant. I was penniless. I am an immigrant and I’m Black, which is something I never seemed to have taken into consideration. So the Diana Ross piece, for instance — she fascinated me because the first thing I ever bought for myself with money I earned was Meet the Supremes. And I still have the album. I don’t mean to malign her. And it wasn’t that I was disappointed in her. I was just observing things. I would write these things and they would be published. And I was quite grateful, but not grateful enough to change anything I wrote. I mean, if someone hadn’t liked it and said, “If you change this or that …” I would never have changed anything.
Really? You’ve really never taken an editor’s suggestion?
Yeah. And that includes Mr. William Shawn [longtime editor of The New Yorker].
Once I had a long argument and a long back and forth with him because he wanted me to change a sentence in one of my short stories, and I said no. And he was very upset. And he gave me a list of five authors — I think it was John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth. Oh, gosh, there were five. Sometimes I can remember all five of them. Sometimes I can only remember four. And he said, “All of these” — they were white men, of course — “had changed pieces for The New Yorker’s sensibilities. But when they published them in a book, they would revert to the way they had wanted it.” I remember saying to him, “Well, they shouldn’t have.”
And I didn’t change it, and he published it the way I had it. It was a short story in my first collection. I mean, I didn’t know that you couldn’t do that. Now that I know, I still would. I think you have to.
I don’t know why I was so arrogant. My friend Sandy [the writer Ian Frazier] remembers this. I would do things like … I met Jacqueline Onassis many times privately, and so on. And then one time I met her in public and we were introduced again and she acted as if we had not met before and said, “How do you do?” I was so offended — so young and silly. I remember saying to her, “We have met,” and I walked away, because we had met. Why pretend we hadn’t, or why do this nonsense?
I remember thinking, “If you are going to go out, you should remember people. And if you don’t remember them, don’t do that.” It was just the kind of fierce, unbothered confidence that had carried Kincaid from Antigua to the pages of The New Yorker — and that same quality, she suggests, is what runs through every piece collected in Putting Myself Together.
