Harare Review of Books

352 pp. August 5, 2025, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Non-fiction anthology.

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It’s always interesting to read a writer over time—their collected works over a period of their life—to see the changes in their thinking and what stays the same, to see their obsessions. In Kincaid’s work, that obsession, as I’m sure she’d admit too, is gardens. But it’s fascinating to observe as well, in this collection, Kincaid’s development as an essayist, from her early musings on living alone in New York for the first time to her later pieces, a mother pondering her relationship with her own mother, a daughter losing her father, her mother.

I’ve always admired Kincaid’s incredible facility with language, how she plays with words—not in the form of puns, but in sentence construction, in the construction of her essays. There is much to learn here; and again, with this collection, you can watch her style evolve, her approach to telling the stories of her life—her reflections about home, her recollections of her complicated childhood—morph and change shape over the years. You can see, too, that this facility with words and structure was there from the very beginning, that she has only honed it over time. Along with that comes her droll, sometimes sharp humour, most often wielded against the coloniser, Britain. These are among my favourite essays.

But back to gardens. Kincaid teaches me that you can write about the same thing over and over, finding new ways to inquire into your preoccupation—just as an artist before a canvas does. She teaches me that words are brushstrokes, that practice doesn’t make perfect so much as it is in routine that one continuously finds new ways to explore and express, as one turns one’s eye within and without; that words are a tool, like a paintbrush and a box of paints, for the examined life.

Thank you to FSG and NetGalley for DRC access.

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