SOURCE: “An interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” in Publishers Weekly, January 1, 1996, pp. 54–6.

In the following interview, Kreilkamp provides an overview of Kincaid's life and literary career upon the publication of The Autobiography of My Mother, and Kincaid comments on her relationship with the New Yorker, publishing, and gardening.

A teenage girl in the mid-1960s abandons her home on Antigua, a tiny island in the West Indies, bound for New York and not to return home for 19 years. She becomes an au pair for a family in Scarsdale, N.Y., then for a different family in New York City. She breaks off all contact with her mother, takes photography courses at the New School, dyes her hair blonde and changes her name. A few years later, in her early 20s, she convinces Ingenue, a girls' magazine, to allow her to interview Gloria Steinem. The article is a success, and...