"[7] Kincaid received, and frequently excelled in, a British education growing up, as Antigua did not gain independence from the United Kingdom until 1981.

[10] After this move, Kincaid refused to send money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".

She dropped out after a year and returned to New York,[3] where she started writing for the teenage girls' magazine Ingénue, The Village Voice, and Ms.

[17] Kincaid's work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because it largely draws upon her own life and because her tone is often perceived as angry.

[12] Kincaid counters that many writers draw upon personal experience, so to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.

[20] She resigned from The New Yorker in 1996 when then editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue as an original feminist voice.

[21] In December 2021, Kincaid was announced as the recipient of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize, the magazine's annual lifetime achievement award.

"[23] Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development"[6] and features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences.

[24] Excerpts from her non-fiction book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary, Life and Debt.

[25] One of Kincaid's contributions according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr, African-American literary critic, scholar, writer, and public intellectual, is that: She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility.

[28] Giovanna Covi describes her unique writing: "The tremendous strength of Kincaid's stories lies in their capacity to resist all canons.

They move at the beat of a drum and the rhythm of jazz…"[26] She is described as writing with a "double vision"[26] meaning that one line of plot mirrors another, providing the reader with rich symbolism that enhances the possibilities of interpretation.

Kincaid's writing is largely influenced by her life circumstances even though she discourages readers from taking her fiction literally.

Her writing stresses deep social and even political commentary, as Harold Bloom cites as a reason why the "literary qualities" of her work tend to be less of a focus for critics.

"[30] Another New York Times review describes it as "not an easy book to stomach" but goes on to explain, "Kincaid's force and originality lie in her refusal to curb her tongue, in an insistence on home truths that spare herself least of all.

"[28] Kate Tuttle addresses this in an article for The Boston Globe: "Kincaid allowed that critics are correct to point out the book's complexity.

"[32] On the other hand, there has been much praise for her writing, for instance: "The superb precision of Kincaid's style makes it a paradigm of how to avoid lots of novelistic pitfalls.

[34] After students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's actions and the university's failure to respond, Kincaid was one of several signatories to say that she wished to retract her signature.