In My Brother, Kincaid's memoir of the illness and subsequent death of her youngest brother, Devon Drew, many details of her own history emerge. Kincaid has three younger halfbrothers, and the four siblings have all struggled with their difficult mother. Three years after Devon was born, Kincaid left Antigua to live in the United States. The event that precipitates this memoir is the death of Devon on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. He died of AIDS.

Because My Brother is an unconventional memoir, other biographical facts are not revealed. Kincaid was born on May 25, 1949, in St. Johns, Antigua, and was named Elaine Potter Richardson. In 1966, Kincaid immigrated to the United States to be a live-in babysitter for a family in Scarsdale, New York, a job she's told interviewers should be rightfully called "servant." Later, she worked as an au pair for a family in New...