The Fast and the Curious

Halfway through Slipstream, her intense, poetic, and candid memoir of her father, Rachel Manley referred, very much in passing, to her own first marriage in 1971. “I was briefly married to someone I had known for only ten days,” she wrote back in 2000. “I would pay for this when I found myself alone, pregnant and destitute in London, too proud to ask either my English or my Jamaican family for help.” In her equally intimate memoir of a beloved grandmother, Horses in Her Hair, from 2008, Manley mentioned the marriage again, just as succinctly: “At Easter I flew down to Barbados, where I met and married my first husband, whom I hardly knew, in a matter of weeks. My family was exasperated with me, and really, when I think about it, that was my design — to gain my father’s attention.”

Two tantalizing allusions — not mentioning her husband’s name, not even when revealing that she called their child after him “in the English tradition.” It is at the...