In June, I visited Jamaica Kincaid at her home in Vermont, and not long after we met, she walked me over to a bust of Thomas Jefferson looming over a shaded corner of her garden, introducing me to him like he was an old friend or a hostage. “Very controversial, but we will explain,” she said. “When summer is over, he spends the winter in the basement.” Then, she showed me a plant called the twin-leaf, which has one frond divided into two nearly identical leaflets. “The two halves are not identical — is that Jefferson or no?” Kincaid asked, showing me the fraternal leaves with professorial wonder and not a small amount of delight. Its scientific name, Jeffersonia diphylla, was given to it by the botanist Benjamin Smith Barton, one of Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries, “before anyone thought of his twin nature,” she said, of the president’s duality.

Kincaid is an admirer of Jefferson’s writing on horticulture, so when she discovered this plant, it appealed to her; she saw that it spoke to his fundamental contradiction as both a theorist of democratic liberty and slaver. “One has to contemplate these histories,” Kincaid said. “And so, I find him a good person to have a conversation with.”

At 76, Kincaid is both youthful and monumental, a down-to-earth person possessed of a towering intellect. Although she has shrunk some over the years, she still stands at nearly six feet. Her dark brown hair was parted down the center of her scalp, woven into two cute plaits, little commas curling near her shoulders. She wore a silver watch with the clock face on the inside of her wrist as a tribute to her late father. Her laugh, which I heard often, was filtered through her accent, an undulating Antiguan inflection that swayed like a gently rocked boat.

Kincaid’s sprawling garden sits on a bountiful property in North Bennington, beside a house originally built and inhabited by Robert H. Woodworth, a pioneer of time-lapse photography. Here she begins developing her ideas, influenced by the cultivated wildness outside. In an essay included in her new book, “Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974-,” to be published on Aug. 5 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she asserts that, rather than creating a garden in the conventional way — overdetermined by the gardener’s expectations — she favors a looser approach.

“I was never really making a garden in that way so much as I was having a conversation,” she writes, “a conversation with all the components, all the attributes, all the dangers, all the failures and pitfalls, all the moral and immoral dilemmas, all of the history of the garden and the way it has formed, starting with the Edenic prelapsarian ideal/idyll and its postlapsarian catastrophe.” By working in the garden and noting what she learns, she puts herself in unexpected dialogue with predecessors like Jefferson.

Maybe Kincaid likes thinking alongside Jefferson because, like him — like the garden we walked in — her own work lives in tension with itself, yoking the violent and the peaceful, the mundane and the metaphysical, channeling the chaos and collision of existence. Kincaid’s stories, in one way or another, concern how we can achieve self-discovery within that chaos. That’s the reality Kincaid has tried to render: intricately unfolding chronicles that record what it’s like to bumble through time, grasping for meaning. She is animated by maximum receptivity to experience and the way that experience can deepen into knowledge. Her narrators take in the world’s enormity from acute, personal angles, spelunking into an experiential mess that Kincaid calls the swirl. “I just sort of plunge into things,” she told me.

“Putting Myself Together” captures her questing sensibility through a half-century’s worth of personal essays and cultural criticism that provide a model of sumptuous slow thinking. It lets us see how Kincaid made her mark decades ago, in pieces that attempted to describe the passage of time across different scales — whether the entrancing dilapidation of New York in the 1970s or the extraction of colonization over centuries. She is seized by what it means to be human in a world that finds new ways to devalue the human. Her writing gets to the root of things. “It takes me so long to write,” she told me. “You see me in the garden walking around just plundering around thinking of a sentence. Sometimes it takes me a week to finish a sentence just to get it right.”

We took a break from strolling in the garden and had lunch. I spied, many yards away, a young deer tiptoeing onto the property. “Where?” Kincaid asked urgently, and I pointed. She searched the green expanse of lawn, but by then he was gone. “I fire bullets at him, but not to hit him,” she said. “I like to just go and fire the gun, so that the smoke …” and she trailed off, nearly whispering, leaving the suggestion to linger between us. “He’s very beautiful,” she said. “He’s just very young and doesn’t understand that he’s going to be somebody’s dinner.” For two of the three days that I visited her, a shotgun lay on her kitchen table, the barrel trained on a wall, safely turned away from people, the butt resting on top of a copy of Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” which she was rereading. During our time together, that juxtaposition between the visceral and cerebral made me wonder: Is that Kincaid or no?

The cover of “Putting Myself Together” is an image of Kincaid’s style in the 1970s when she was coming of age in a cataclysmically vivid New York City. It’s a picture of clothing pinned to a wall — a brown felt hat like one that belonged to her dad, a pink polo shirt, a skirt with a pack of Lucky Strikes tucked into the waist, red-ribboned ballet flats. Kincaid directs the photo shoot in shadow, her hand fixing the outfit in profile from just outside the frame.

The collection is something of an answer to the question of who the woman that wore the clothes was then and who she became. It collates early work from publications like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone and literary journals alongside later work for The New Yorker. Despite its breadth, it doesn’t have the feel of an intentional autobiography or memoir, of a wizened writer making sense of her life in words. “I’m not a professional writer,” she laughed. “I’m an amateur writer.” The vulnerability associated with beginner’s mind is a crucial part of her repertoire.

“I have this theory that you are who you are at 7,” Kincaid told me. “When you reach 7, that’s your life, and that you just repeat until you’re 100. Until you die, you’re 7. I find great comfort in that.” She looked up at the ceiling in her sunroom, which is also her office. “I feel all the things that are interesting about me” developed at that precise age. “My curiosity, my observation.”

Kincaid, who was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, in 1949, has spent her life cultivating the kaleidoscopic perception of that 7-year-old self. When she was little, Elaine’s loving but ambivalent mother gave her books so that she could do her own reading without being bothered. Those books introduced the girl to life under the psychological and cultural influence of British colonialism: She was educated with English primers and taught the classics by Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth, and she believes her mother, Annie, picked her first name from a Tennyson poem. On Kincaid’s seventh birthday, her mother gave her the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

At that fateful age, Kincaid — a bright child who had developed a talent as a class clown — misbehaved at school and was given what her teacher thought would be an onerous punishment: copying out the first two books of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” by hand. (She had no electricity, she said, and would have to copy the passages by lamplight or moonlight.) Along the way, she found herself identifying with Lucifer because of his rebellious spirit. Her first “act of interpretation,” as she described it to me, was connecting the fall of Lucifer with the story of Percy the Bad Chick, an anthropomorphic bird from a children’s primer. Percy’s mother warns him not to fly over the farmyard’s fence, but he does so anyway and crashes to the ground. This moment of linking a children’s book with one of the Western canon’s most acclaimed works was a premonition of her singular vision.

“Often, I was punished for speaking,” Kincaid explained to me. “I was punished for being intelligent. They say I could talk before I walked, which is usually not true. The other thing they used to say when I was little is that I had a phenomenal memory, because I could just recall things. And then at one point, it just became a curse, because I would correct people. And they would say, ‘What a memory you have,’ but in a scornful way. And so I just learned not to speak.”

Kincaid’s parents sent her to New York in 1965, at age 16, to work and send money home. She lived in Westchester and worked as a nanny and later as a receptionist at Magnum Photos, then attended and dropped out of Franconia College in New Hampshire. She did not send money home as instructed, disliking the idea of being separated from the fruits of her labor. She continued her youthful rebellion and separation from her mother by deciding to write. This was all driven by Kincaid’s sense that, as she said in a 2003 interview with The Believer, her mother had written her life. Relocating to the city was a critical act of self-authorship. “One day I just packed up my car and said, ‘I’m going to be a writer!’ and I moved to New York.” She settled into a house in Lower Manhattan and paid $175 a month in rent, which was often late. She cut her hair short and dyed it blonde. While hanging out with friends, she decided she would change her name from Elaine to Jamaica Kincaid, picking a Caribbean first name and a Scottish surname, so that she could write without her parents finding out.

Eventually, Ingenue magazine took a chance on an idea of hers, assigning her to interview popular figures about what they were like at 17. Very quickly, she moved on to more ambitious assignments — reviews and reportage, which she calls “observations” — at other stalwart publications of the era: Rolling Stone, Ms., The Village Voice. While reporting for those assignments she met the New Yorker writers George W.S. Trow and Ian Frazier, with whom she became close. She went to parties, frequented Andy Warhol’s factory and sang background for Holly Woodlawn, one of the Warhol superstars. It all looked very glamorous, but Kincaid has a slightly different memory of her social life: “I’d go to a lot of parties because I had no money, and it was the only time I’d eat.”

In 1974, Trow introduced her to William Shawn, the eminent editor of The New Yorker, and she began to write for the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, a form that played to her wicked sense of humor, inventiveness and strength for capturing offbeat details. Talk stories, which were then published without bylines, allowed her to experiment with her voice on the page. “I think that was one of the best things for a writer, to just write anonymously when you’re young,” she said. Kincaid’s Talk pieces are wry but slyly vivacious, etching quick-lived events — a benefit party thrown for Gary Indiana, whom Kincaid described as “the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society”; a press breakfast for the economist Milton Friedman’s PBS series, which she reviewed in the form of an expense account; a panoramic look at what a dozen random people were doing one Monday at noon — into lasting portraits of a deliriously dire-straits city. Two years later, she became a staff writer for the magazine.

“I was the only Black woman there, which I didn’t notice,” Kincaid said, because, she said, she was too focused on her work. “When I was there, I wasn’t thinking about my own race so much. I was thinking about, How can I write? I was so obsessed with writing.” She remembers that the white women working there as secretaries and fact-checkers were skeptical of her rise at the magazine and kept asking her how she got her job, even after she’d already explained her story. But by and large it was a place to thrive. In 1979, she married one of William Shawn’s sons, the composer Allen Shawn, with whom she had a baby and moved to Vermont. Years later, they moved into the time-lapse house with their two children, Annie and Harold. (Kincaid and Shawn divorced in 2002; after a turbulent split, they are now friends.)

In 1978, The New Yorker published her short story “Girl,” a hypnotic list of domestic instructions dictated by a mother to her daughter; it made her famous. (The story is still widely anthologized.) In the introduction to “Putting Myself Together,” Henry Louis Gates writes that Kincaid’s innovation in “Girl” was “to write, as it were, not exactly beyond race, but with one’s ‘blackness’ assumed, an uncommented-on default.” In the late ’70s, Black writers took cues from the Black Power and Black Arts movements, asserting and elevating the specificity of Black experiences. Kincaid’s work, while not unique in its approach to the assumed Black voice, offered an array of witty and playful formal innovations on the sound of it. “Most American high schoolers tend to encounter ‘Girl’ first, which is interesting because it’s such a specifically Antiguan piece,” the novelist and essayist Naomi Jackson told me. “So much of the vocabulary is opaque to people who are not just not from the Caribbean, but not from Antigua, specifically.” The story’s experimental form shaped later writers; David Foster Wallace modeled part of his postmodern novel “Infinite Jest” on the incantatory phrasing and sentence structure in “Girl.”

Jonathan Galassi, Kincaid’s longtime editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, told me that “the blur between fiction and nonfiction” is part of her appeal. Indeed, many of Kincaid’s multifarious works, which dig into the complex relationship between personal agency and systemic power, anticipate contemporary autofiction. “Annie John” and “Lucy” explore the simultaneously loving, vexing and unequal relationships between mothers and daughters. In “A Small Place,” Kincaid is gripped by the afterlife of colonial violence, parsing its impacts with elliptical curiosity. Stylistically, she favors a give-and-take between the imagistic efficiency of poetry — potent phrases and spot-on descriptions — and the slow-moving inefficiency of real-time revelation. Her writing on gardening, represented amply in the new book, reflects a mature version of the interpretive flair she displayed as a girl. “Memory is a gardener’s real palette,” she writes in another piece collected in the book, “memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future.”

Jackson, whose parents are from Antigua and Barbados, told me, “I think it’s not overstating the case that encountering the work of Jamaica Kincaid made it seem possible for me to have a life as a writer.” She has taught Kincaid in many of her classes, including a course, at Rutgers University-Newark, devoted entirely to her work. Galassi argued that Kincaid’s mix of genres and rhetorical strategies and emotional registers (her “justifiable anger,” for example, mixed with her “dreaminess”) make her unique, an original, “not a product” publishing trendy, palatable titles. She’s so essential to literature, he told me, that “if there wasn’t a Jamaica Kincaid, we would have invented her.”

In Kincaid’s sunroom, an inactive wasps’ nest hung from the ceiling. The fragrant scent of Douglas fir in the house’s beams mingled with the sounds of reggae music emanating from a speaker on the other side of the room. The music’s recursive, slow-dragging rhythms kindled the reflective atmosphere. “The writing is so internal, even when it’s an external thing,” she said. “I do very much believe in the unconscious, and it’s not exactly the very best way to live. I’ll do things, and I’ll think, What was I thinking? Why did I do that?” “Putting Myself Together” provides something of an answer, even though Kincaid is adamant that the book is not autobiography or memoir, two labels she believes are usually too reductive to apply to her work.

In a 1992 essay called “Biography of a Dress,” included in the collection, Kincaid writes that she invented herself as a toddler, when her mother had a friend pierce her ears, causing days of swelling and pain. In that moment, Kincaid felt a cleavage open up in her sense of herself. “I separated myself from myself, and I became two people (two small children then, I was 2 years old), one having the experience, the other observing the one having the experience. And the observer, perhaps because it was an act of my own will (strong then, but stronger now), my first and only real act of self-invention, is the one of the two I most rely on, the one of the two whose voice I believe to be the true voice.”

This work of dividing herself between the person doing and the person watching seems like an important step in becoming a writer. Her work’s charge comes from electric encounters with ideas and the mechanisms of her own mind. One such encounter came in 1958, when her mother sent her, via steamship, to live with her grandparents in Dominica. She found herself in the village of Massacre, outdoors, listening to a teacher read to the class. The village was named in memory of a massacre of native Caribs carried out by the English in 1674, but Kincaid’s teacher was speaking about another historical moment. From beneath a tamarind tree, she read to her students a Time magazine article about the segregationist Alabama politician George Wallace. Her teacher asked the class, “What to do in a world like that, with a man like that?”

Kincaid suggested sending him Bibles; she was so indoctrinated into English concepts of Christianity and propriety, and his cruelty convinced her that he was a “savage” in need of civilizing. As she listened to her teacher in the shade of the tamarind tree, she realized that the tree was from India, and that understanding opened up so much for her about the entwinements of people and nations. Considering this confluence of time, place and insight, Kincaid spoke of how “the sad, tragic poetry of life comes rushing at you.” She continued, “It makes you believe in something greater than yourself, that there is something happening that you can’t see.”

Even now, nearly 70 years later, when she concentrates enough to enter the mental state in which the ideas flow, she can perceive that something greater. She enters the space of suspended girlhood where she was first struck by the notion that she could chase one thought from where she was, sitting under a tree in Dominica, all the way to another side of the globe. Still the one who went on steamships to Dominica for the first time and to the market with her mother and who learned to do the Watusi from reading a magazine. The one who idolized Milton’s Lucifer. It all goes back to the voice that took shape under the tamarind tree in Massacre, who learned to connect the massacre of Caribs and the ongoing desecration of colonization to the fact that the tamarind tree is in the Caribbean at all.

For the person with a lifelong interest in the way power works, her power is nurturing her access to that impressionable voice, being a student and devotee of it. She knows that maturity is not just about repressing the inner child or cradling her but learning how to rouse her from sleep. The secret is in recognizing how much of her she still has access to. It’s in honoring the ephemeral plants that emerge and disappear like the pop-up parties and downtown raves she went to in the ’70s. Admiring the garden, I praised Kincaid’s permissiveness about the self-seeding vegetation growing within it. She scanned the random sprouts around us and said: “It’s a strange thing to say, but I feel as if it’s me. I would like it if, within reason, I was allowed to do what I wanted to do.”

In the house made by an inventor of time-lapse photography, Kincaid continued to chart her own shape-shifting, 7-year-old and 76-year-old self. I thought that she couldn’t view work about her life as autobiography because of her endorsement of amateurism — maybe the act of being an authority of herself felt horrifying and inauthentic. What did she think? She answered with something more profoundly personal. “It sounds awfully wooey, you know, kind of hippie-ish, but somewhere I’m still Elaine,” she said, and “she doesn’t know how to write.” We walked back to her sunroom. “I wouldn’t know how to write an autobiography or a memoir about my childhood, but Jamaica could look at Elaine and write about her.”

Weeks after our encounter, I remembered the thing that made her so enthused about Jeffersonia diphylla, the twin-leaf. She was almost ecstatic whenever she spoke about it, italicizing her speech with emphasis on the plant’s ephemerality. “It blooms, and then it disappears as if it was never there.” She kept saying that. Kincaid’s ruminative, around-the-mulberry-bush treatment of humanity’s fleeting nature on this earth may be the key to her artistic project and its endurance. Humans are circuitous thinkers, not always having epiphanies — except when we are. “I plead guilty to narcissism, but I see myself in everything,” Kincaid said. Wait, she hesitated, started again. “It’s not so much that I see myself, but when I’m reading something or when I’m doing something, I’m really in it, I find out everything I can about it or I can manage about it. But left to my own, there’s very little that divides me from the world.”

In the garden, Kincaid was matter-of-fact but thoughtful, smacking mosquitoes and watching out for snails. She considered her impulse to crush them, a version of the mischievous Percy girl showing up now. “I don’t claim to be moral” she said. “I’m just as bad as the rest or just as capable of being as bad as the rest.” I glanced over at her profile, and for a second she looked a little shy. “It’s one of the things that just makes you want to stay home, because, given the opportunity, you will do something bad. It’s irresistible. You have to really work at it.”