This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. All manner of writers have graced the pages of the New Yorker in the past century, including many of the greatest prose stylists

of our time. But it's very rare to find one who nailed their unique voice right off the bat,

the way Jamaica Kincaid did. It was 1974, when Jamaica first began writing for this magazine,

reporting about life in New York, very often for the talk of the town

section. She was a young immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua. Kincades started writing

with a wit and a particular bite about the world she had entered. She went on to write about

her family, about Antigua, about how people from the Caribbean see Americans next door.

She wrote about the dissolution of a marriage, about gardening, which she took up with extraordinary

passion. She once said, everything I write is autobiographical. But none of it is true in the sense

of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie.

The truth, on the other hand, is complicated.

Jamaica Kincaid's new book is a collection of pieces that spans almost half a century in print.

It's a total delight.

It's called Putting Myself Together.

Jamaica, I've been reading you for half my life, but I have to say there are so many

pieces here that I knew very little about, and in a way they form a rough autobiography

of your writing life, at least, and your first words printed in the New Yorker,

it turns out, were a dispatch from the West Indian American Day parade. And this is for our

listeners who haven't attended a huge event that marches through Brooklyn on Labor Day. Could you

read an excerpt from that very first talk of the town piece

that you wrote for The New Yorker in 1974?

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