Becoming a teacher did much to refresh my love of reading: it lets you go over and over small bits of text and share them too. I came across Jamaica Kincaid as a writer of teenagers, but actually she has a wide range and a startling biography.‘Girl’ is a very short story entirely in the imperative about the duties of a young girl in the Caribbean – another story about women, and cleaning. The voice, shape and details are all spot on: I love to teach this; it’s the definition of a rich text.
First published in The New Yorker, June 1978 and collected in At the Bottom of the River (FSG, 1983)
