Review of Jamaica Kincaid’s “Putting Myself Together”
Spanning nearly fifty years of writing, Jamaica Kincaid’s latest book, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974—, is a captivating and layered work. It is a collection that resists simple description, blending criticism, memoir, letters, and hybrid prose forms into something both personal and expansive. The pieces range widely in tone and subject matter, but together they form a portrait of a writer whose concerns—history, family, and American culture—have never been static or easily boxed in.
Calling the book a collection of essays feels like underselling it. It is less a neat shelf of polished pieces and more like a living garden: unmanicured, wild in places, yet full of patterns and connections that reveal themselves over time. The pleasure of the book lies not in its orderliness but in its resistance to it. Like flowers in a field that bloom in unexpected harmony, Kincaid’s nonfiction dazzles because it thrives on unpredictability. Each piece is a joy in itself, but it becomes even more resonant when read in the context of the whole.
Perhaps the most obvious organizing principle is chronological order. The book begins with her work from the 1970s, capturing the sound of a young writer—quick, energetic, and brimming with sharp observations. These early essays, some no more than four pages, are concise and cutting, often zeroing in on a single subject with precision. Whether she’s writing about Diana Ross or Gone with the Wind, there is a clarity and impatience that feels unmistakably youthful.
Reading these first works, one can almost hear the voice of a twenty-five-year-old testing her pen in public. There is ambition, even a certain impatience with the world’s slowness to catch up to her thoughts. But there is also playfulness—a willingness to write with wit and speed, as though the ideas might vanish if she didn’t catch them quickly on the page.
Yet even within that first decade of her career, Kincaid’s voice evolves into something deeper and more layered. A standout from this period, “Antigua Crossing: A Deep and Blue Passage on the Caribbean Sea” (1978), published in Rolling Stone, is a lyrical meditation on her grandmother, colonialism, and the ocean that separates and connects the Caribbean islands. Here she begins to meld personal memory with history, fiction with fact, intimacy with political critique.
The piece signals the emergence of a central theme that runs through much of her work: the persistence of colonial legacies, how they thread themselves through family structures, gender roles, language, and even the way one sees and names the world. In this way, her writing resists nostalgia; it is clear-eyed about beauty and equally alert to the forces that shape it.
Where other writers might have remained comfortable in the personal essay form, Kincaid ventures beyond it. Over the decades, she experiments with modes and voices, finding new ways to approach familiar concerns. In “Ovando” (1989), she addresses the Spanish soldier who governed the West Indies as though he were a living correspondent, the tone by turns biting and amused. In “Jamaica Kincaid’s New York” (1977), she intertwines letters she wrote to her mother with her private reflections on those same years, creating a layered portrait of the distance—both physical and emotional—between them.
Another highlight is her election journal, a long-form piece that blends political observation with personal anecdote. Kincaid’s political writing never feels detached from her own life; instead, the public and private intermingle, reinforcing her view that the political is always personal.
The book also gathers work she wrote for other people’s books—introductions, forewords, and prefaces that, taken together, provide a fascinating glimpse into her literary relationships. Her introduction to the 1995 Best American Essays is a compact masterclass in writing and reading, full of aphoristic wisdom about the craft. Her foreword to the 2007 edition of Alexandre Dumas’ Georges is so persuasive that it may send readers straight to the library, as it did for me.
These occasional pieces do more than show her generosity as a literary citizen—they also reveal her intellectual curiosity and her ability to see connections across time and genre. Whether she’s engaging with a nineteenth-century French novelist or a contemporary essayist, she approaches the work with the same attentiveness she brings to her own.
In her most recent writings, Kincaid turns to the subject of gardening, a passion that has long threaded through her fiction and nonfiction alike. These pieces, set primarily in her Vermont home, are rich with imagery and philosophical reflection. For Kincaid, a garden is never just a garden; it is a space where history, migration, and cultivation—both literal and metaphorical—are constantly at play.
Her prose in these gardening essays is lush but precise, rooted in physical detail yet alert to broader meanings. A description of a plant may turn into a meditation on colonial trade routes; an observation about soil may become a reflection on memory and inheritance. It is a testament to her skill that the reader never feels jarred by these shifts.
Taken together, the essays in Putting Myself Together are more than a career retrospective—they are a record of a restless and evolving mind. Over fifty years, Kincaid has refused to let her work be hemmed in by expectations, whether about genre, subject, or tone.
What the collection ultimately shows is the freedom that comes from allowing a body of work to grow in its own way. Like a garden that changes with the seasons, Kincaid’s writing is both of its time and timeless, rooted in the particulars of her experience but branching outward into questions that resonate far beyond it.
Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974— is a dazzling testament to that freedom. It invites readers not only to follow the arc of a singular voice but also to think about what it means to live and write without surrendering to imposed boundaries. In the end, the book offers not just a portrait of Jamaica Kincaid but also an argument for the beauty—and necessity—of resisting the tidy categories that the world tries to impose.
“Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974—”
By Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages
