By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘What I Have Been Doing Lately’ is a short story by the Antigua-born writer Jamaica Kincaid (born 1949). It was first published in the Paris Review in 1981 before being reprinted in Kincaid’s first published book, At the Bottom of the River, in 1983.
The story is narrated by someone – probably a young girl – who recounts her dreamlike experiences which involve leaving her house at night, going for a walk, crossing a body of water, and falling down a hole, before meeting a strange woman who asks her what she has been doing lately.