While her work has always been critically acclaimed--her nonfiction book,
My Brother (1997), was nominated for the National Book Award--Kincaid has at the same time, through her insistence on the paradox of her experience, managed to get under the skin of people on all points of the political spectrum. Reviewing the 1988 essay
A Small Place, the
New Statesman and Society (7 October 1988) excoriated Kincaid's "inexplicable" descent into a "sniveling attack on the sins of the nasty--and long-departed colonial power" that had dominated her West Indian home of Antigua. Her
New Yorker colleagues were upset to see portrayals that paralleled their own lives in Kincaid's
Lucy (1990), a novel that explores the experiences of a young West Indian au pair in the home of upper-middle-class Manhattanites. The characters are composites, Kincaid responded in a 1990
New York Times Magazine interview, but she added, "I would never say I wouldn't write about an experience I've had." Audrey Edwards of
Essence magazine asked in 1991 whether her marriage to a white man, Allen Shawn, son of
New Yorker editor William Shawn, was a "contradiction." "I'm a person," Kincaid answered.
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