"What I Have Been Doing Lately" was first published in the Paris Review in 1981. Kincaid included this piece in her first published book, At the Bottom of the River (1983), which earned her the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. According to Leslie Garis in her New York Times Magazine article about Kincaid, At the Bottom of the River made Kincaid "an instant literary success." David Leavitt, in his review for the Village Voice, praised Kincaid for "her ability to articulate the internal workings of a potent imagination without sacrificing the rich details of the external world on which that imagination thrives."