My Brother - Softcover

Kincaid, Jamaica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374525625 ISBN 13: 9780374525620

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998

Synopsis

Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother's life and death is also a story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening figure of the writer's mother. My Brother is an unblinking record of a life that ended too early, and it speaks volumes about the difficult truths at the heart of all families.

My Brother is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

About this title

Review:

In 1995 Jamaica Kincaid found out that her brother Devon was dying of AIDS in Antigua. Although she hardly knew him--in fact, she had distanced herself from her family after departing the island as a teenager--she soon returned and began visiting him in the hospital. My Brother is a record of this precarious, overdue rapprochement. More to the point, though, it is a rumination on family, grief, language and the almost impenetrable mystery that each person represents to others. Kincaid's prose is as musical and evocative as ever, and given the subject matter, this memoir is often surprisingly funny. When her mother denies ever having made a mistake while raising her children, for example, the author notes: "Even now, years later, I am still surprised by this, because I spend a good part of my day on my knees in apology to my own children."

Review:

"Controlled and fearless perfection." --Carolyn See, The Washington Post

"A sustained meditation on the grinding wheel of family, with mother always at the hub; on the countries of our past, both real and emotional, which we have fled and in which we have felt like strangers; on death as a devastating injury and dying as an irritating inconvenience . . . a memoir about death that portrays it as it is, not as we would have it be, as we so often tailor it both in memoir and fiction." --Anna Quindlen, The New York Times Book Review

"Visceral and wrenching, this is a memoir of mourning . . . Kincaid's revelations are both intoxicating and redeeming." --René Graham, The Boston Sunday Globe

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0374525625
• ISBN 13: 9780374525620
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208