SOURCE: A review of The Autobiography of My Mother, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 73, No. 3, Fall, 1999, pp. 137–39.

In the following review, Plant offers a positive assessment of The Autobiography of My Mother.

“[T]he name of any one person is at once her history recapitulated and abbreviated,” declares Xuela Claudette Richardson. Her name, she concludes, was not her “real name.” What she was called was rather the path to “a humiliation so permanent that it would replace your own skin.” Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother is an account of Xuela's search for who she really was and her conscious, studied avoidance of the humiliation her history portended. Her search began and dead-ended with her parents. Her mother, Xuela Claudette Desvarieux, was abandoned in infancy, to be claimed by a convent nun, Claudette Desvarieux. And the moment of Xuela Claudette Richardson's birth was her own mother's death. Her...