Annie Drew

In this portrait of Kincaid's mother, there's one central and shocking truth that Kincaid revisits many times: "my mother hates her children." In an interview in the Boston Globe, Kincaid said, "Mother loves us best when we are dying. We need her. It's when we're walking around that she's critical of us. When we're thriving." In an interview in Salon Kincaid says that the core of her novel The Autobiography of My Mother is "drawn from an observation I' ve about my own mother: That all her children are quite happy to have been born, but all of us are quite sure she should never have been a mother."

Capable of deep maternal devotion, Annie Drew cares for Devon tirelessly and with great tenderness when he is ill. Likewise, Kincaid recalls that when she was a child with a clogged nose, her mother would suck the...