One Book to Rule Them All

I’m over at AWP Writer talking about one of my all-time favorite writers, Jamaica Kincaid, and her work. You can read the full piece here. Below, an excerpt:

“Authors are notoriously relentless for culling the gems from the minutiae of their lives. There is a reason why the t-shirt embroidered with these words, careful, or you’ll end up in my novel, generates such awkward laughter. We all do it. Yet See Now Then is not simply a recounting of the entanglement, disappointment, betrayal, and quiescence that are the four corners of the institution of marriage, though it does that with great facility. I read it as a brilliant unpicking of the intricate tapestry of time, the time that it takes to get from one place to another, from being single and full of promise to being discarded and ridiculed, and all the dances in-between: the sultry samba of innocence, the salsa tempo of dreams, the slow tango of motherhood, the quickstep of parenthood, and the graceful sway of bowing off a stage from which one has been effectively, if impolitely, excused. It is about marriage, and it is about everything else.”