SOURCE: “A Daughter Forced to Be Her Own Mother,” in Christian Science Monitor, January 17, 1996, p. 14.

In the review below, Rubin gives a positive assessment of The Autobiography of My Mother.

The very title of Jamaica Kincaid's third novel, The Autobiography of My Mother, poses a paradox, and not just the time-honored one of labeling a work of fiction a true story. The narrator of this particular “autobiography” is a woman whose mother died giving birth to her. The life story that she tells is not her dead mother's, but her own.

Yet, because the narrator and heroine of this story has no children of her own, it seems impossible that she could be the “mother” of the title, even though it is clearly her autobiography.

Whose story is it? We are left to conclude, perhaps, that this woman, in telling her own life story, is somehow speaking on...