In Jamaica Kincaid, author Diane Simmons provides a thoroughly comprehensive study, a biographical and critical examination of Kincaid and her work. Simmons considers all aspects of Kincaid's work without seeking to confine a complex, independent, and ever-evolving writer within narrow definitions. The first chapter, an elaborate biography, follows Kincaid through her childhood on the West Indian island of Antigua, her young adulthood as an au pair in New York, and her life as a free lancer for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, and as a staff writer for The New Yorker. Simmons shows the remarkable process of self-invention by which an impoverished and awkward West Indian school girl named Elaine Potter Richardson was transformed into the prominent writer Jamaica Kincaid. Drawing from virtually all available critical work on Kincaid, including Simmons's own interview, the first chapter alone is richly detailed enough to stand as the most complete study yet on Kincaid and her writing.