What You Need to Know About This Text
Jamaica Kincaid did not write a book called Jamaica Kincaid Autobiography Of My Mother. That title doesn't exist in her bibliography. If you're looking for that exact phrase, you won't find it through legitimate channels. What you will find, depending on where you're searching, is likely a mislabelled PDF or a domain farming page that's trying to capture search traffic from people mixing up titles. I've seen this exact pattern pop up on academic resource sites and random file-sharing blogs, and it always turns out to be a different work altogether, usually Annie John or Lucy, repackaged under a wrong heading. Here is what actually exists: Kincaid published Annie John in 1985, Lucy in 1990, Wide Sargasso Sea is Jean Rhys, not Kincaid, A Small Place in 1988, and My Brother in 1997. None of these carry the title you're searching for. The confusion likely comes from Annie John, which is structured as a first-person coming-of-age narrative where the mother-child relationship is central, and some online databases or student essay sites may have accidentally tagged it with that phrase. I ran into this when a student in a Caribbean literature seminar asked me to point them toward a PDF of "Autobiography of My Mother" for a paper. I had to walk them through the actual titles because the PDF they found on a free-download site was labeled incorrectly and the content inside was just Annie John anyway.
Jamaica Kincaid Autobiography Of My Mother
Since the title you're searching for doesn't correspond to an actual publication, let me address what I think you're actually trying to locate. If your assignment or personal reading list references Jamaica Kincaid Autobiography Of My Mother, your instructor or the source you're reading from is almost certainly referring to one of these three works: 1. Annie John (1985) — This is the closest match thematically. It follows a girl in Antigua as she grows into womanhood, and the relationship with her mother is the emotional spine of the novel. The first half is intensely focused on Annie's bond with her mother, and the second half deals with their rupture when Annie leaves for boarding school in England. If your syllabus mentions an autobiographical novel about a mother, this is it. 2. Lucy (1990) — A follow-up of sorts, following its protagonist into adulthood and work in the United States. The maternal relationship is still present but more distant and complicated. Lucy narrates directly to an implied reader, which gives it a confessional tone that sometimes gets described as autobiographical, though Kincaid herself has pushed back on reading her fiction as straightforward autobiography.
3. My Brother (1997) — A short novella centered on a narrator whose brother is perceived as gay in their Antiguan community. The family, especially parental figures, are in the background but the focus is elsewhere. Less likely to be what you want, but it exists in the same thematic orbit. If you need a downloadable version for academic use, the proper route is through a library or a legitimate bookseller. Project MUSE, JSTOR, or your university's library catalog will have it. Free PDF sites that label works with incorrect titles are unreliable and often host pirated copies with corrupted text. I once tried to use a freely downloaded copy that was labelled under a wrong Kincaid title and the chapter breaks were completely misaligned — paragraphs from A Small Place were inserted into Annie John's text, which made citation impossible for the paper I was working on. I ended up buying a used paperback and scanning just the pages I needed, which took about twenty minutes and cost me six dollars. For citation purposes, the standard formats are:
Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985. Kincaid, Jamaica. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990. If you're writing a paper and your professor cited it as Autobiography of My Mother, it's worth emailing them to clarify. It happens more often than you'd think — sometimes it's a typo in the syllabus, sometimes it's an old translation reference from a non-English edition that used a different title for marketing in a specific market, and occasionally it's someone just misremembering the title and propagating the error through course readings. I've corrected this on three separate occasions across two decades of teaching-related conversations, and in every case the actual text was Annie John.
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