Very moved by my first exposure to Jamaica Kincaid. Reading My Brother for my Women Write Their Lives class at NYU (after Woolf and Ernaux) and what I find most impressive is that she got out of her native Antigua and found a better life here. What a will and a steely mindset that takes.

I’m about halfway through the book and keep marveling at the strong ties we have to family even when we’ve chosen a completely different path from what they know or can even comprehend. Her truth when writing about her mother is bracing sometimes:

I could have said to my mother, You and I do not get along. I am too well, I am not a sick child, you cannot be a mother to a well child, you are a great person but you are a very bad mother to a child who is not dying or in jail; but I did not say that.

Or:

I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read.

Looking forward to continuing through …