SOURCE: “Sculpted from Fire,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 14, 1996, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder offers a favorable evaluation of The Autobiography of My Mother.

Her mother was a foundling left near the door of a convent on the island of Dominica. And when Xuela, narrator of this beautiful, harsh story, was born, the mother died. So Xuela was a doubled orphan, her woman's lineage extinguished for two generations back.

Furthermore, to be a West Indian woman of color, a mix of Scottish, Carib Indian and African, was to have a history scrawled in such violently contradictory pen strokes—by white freebooters, indigenous forebears and slaves brought over as cargo—as to obliterate itself. To have an obliterated history is to have an unappeasable grievance against the present and the future.

Xuela calls her story, told at the end of her life, the autobiography of her...