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An Angel at my Table (Janet Frame Autobiography #1-3)

by Janet Frame

4.24 of 5 stars 4.24 · rating details · 1,211 ratings · 77 reviews

This autobiography traces Janet Frame's childhood in a poor but intellectually intense family, life as a student, years of incarceration in mental hospitals and eventual entry into the saving world of writers.

Paperback , A Women's Press Classic , 434 pages

Published August 1st 2001 by Women's Press (first published 1982)

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Jun 24, 2015 Aubrey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction , authorness , reality-check , regeneration , 1-read-on-hand , 5-star , r-2014 , 500-wm-to-post , prose-prose-prose , r-goodreads , reviewed , antidote-think-twice-read

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return living to the world bring inevitably a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession; at times I think it must be the best view in the world, ranging even farther than the view from the mountains of love, equal in its rapture and chilling exposure, there in the neighborhood of the ancient gods and goddesses.

I've mentioned Janet Frame's most (in)famous turning point in a previous review of her work, whereupon her winning of an important literary prize convinced the doctors that it would not, in fact, do to give her a lobotomy. It will be gotten out of the way here so I need not have to speak of it again, for it is hardly the most worthwhile of tidbits to take away from this woman's life, who in nomenclature is academically Frame and personally Janet as I, after finishing this autobiography, cannot conceive of calling her by any other name but her own. Nothing else evokes the brilliance.

...on 28 August 1924 I was born, named Janet Paterson Frame, with ready-made parents and a sister and a brother who had already begun their store of experience, inaccessible to me except through their language and the record, always slightly different, of our mother and our father, and as each member of the family was born, each, in a sense with memories on loan, began to supply the individual furnishings of each Was-Land, each Is-Land, and the hopes and dreams of the Future.

She read Proust before writing this, but that was long after her childhood, burgeoning adulthood, asylumhood, long after she began living through the poets and prosecrafts as a plant stretches and strains through infrastructured sun. Her mother would have published had the family not been in poverty, her father found solace in the basics of folk song and mystery, and her siblings made do through the seas of epilepsy and death, as did she before the world intruded upon her teaching in an effort to 'standardize'. It was not the profession but the professionals that got to her, a common story with uncommon means of slapdash diagnosis and excavation via publishing, all in her effort to claim a room for her own.

Language that had betrayed, changed, influenced, could still befriend the isolated, could help when human beings had withdrawn their help.

No extrovert was she, no conqueror of career or cannibalistic society, and yet, somehow, here she is. Worms, misogyny, violent seasickness, even more sickening realization of her own indoctrinated racism and classism, onto the tidier peaks and pitfalls of love, people, and financial support, all of it refracted within her voice that sees the inherent unreliability of any writing as its utmost strength. With a life such as hers, I don't doubt it.

Sitting there among the labelled, bottled brains I ventured to hope for the quality of strength and vigilance in psychiatrists, their continued examination and testing of their humanity without which they might become political operators infected with the endemic virus of psychiatry, politics, and some other professions — believe in the self as God.

Like most of humanity, those beliefs she had that are so often circumscribed by others as "political tendencies" were born from her own experiences at the hands of the system. Like less than most, she went further in her analysis of perception, turning the misjudgment of others the other way round and dissecting her own assumptions founded on hearsay and public opinion. Whether 'twas for her fiction or her effort to be (if even there is or ever was a distinction between the two) is impossible to say, but it made for a tone far more powerful, far more encompassing of the madness of truth, a madness ranging over a vaster plain of the ugly and the fair than even most writers will not willingly attest to, for better or for worse.

This confusing experience...strengthened my resolution never to forget that a writer must stand on the rock of her self and her judgment or be swept away by the tide or sink in the quaking earth: there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death. What was the use of my having survived as a person if I could not maintain my own judgment?

New Zealand, woman, past occupant of a mental institution. With every label, the list grows smaller, yet there is some fortune in her having been one of the colonizers rather than the colonized. I will pay my due to the latter in due time, but for now, I am content with having found Janet; she is a force who is not to be missed.

Not an unusual scene but, as in my visit to the pine forests of the interior, it touched the antenna reaching from childhood, just as childhood contains its own antennae originating in conception and the life of the dead and the newly begun; and feeling the sensation at the nerve ending and its origin in the past among the pine trees and sky and water and light, I made this scene a replacement, a telescoping with the trained economy of memory, so that from then and in the future the memory of this scene contains the collective feeling of those past, and now when I listen to pine trees by water, in light and blue, I feel the link, the fullness of being and loving and losing and wondering, the spinning ‘Why was the world?’ that haunted me in childhood, the shiver of yesterday, yet I remember the pine trees of Ibiza.

...more

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May 23, 2014 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 5 of 5 stars

She was ugly. She tried to kill herself. Several times she mentioned her rotting teeth, implying the inferiority complex she much have developed because of it, her wild shock of curly hair which almost always elicited the suggestion from others to have it straightened, her lack of fashionable clothes. At one dance party she attended no one had asked her to dance so she went home early, by herself, then pretended the next day that she had a blast the night previous.

Her family was poor and she had She was ugly. She tried to kill herself. Several times she mentioned her rotting teeth, implying the inferiority complex she much have developed because of it, her wild shock of curly hair which almost always elicited the suggestion from others to have it straightened, her lack of fashionable clothes. At one dance party she attended no one had asked her to dance so she went home early, by herself, then pretended the next day that she had a blast the night previous.

Her family was poor and she had suffered the deaths of two of her siblings. Mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic, at that time when very little was known about mental illnesses (she was born in 1924 in Dunedin, New Zealand), she spent some eight years in and out of mental institutions. Earlier she had left her hometown for the city to study and become a teacher but this didn't pan out. And so there she was, this poor miserable young woman: physically unattractive, with rotting teeth (later extracted so now with dentures), most likely with halitosis, a failure in her intended career, carrying the stigma of being a madwoman, a virgin and probably single for life.

Yet she had made me adore her.

This is the second of her three-volume autobiography. I haven't read the first and the third, but this one was enough for me to see the inner beauty of this writer who, as she draws you into her pain, longings and dreams could make you whisper through the pages, as if she could hear you, no, no, no, you are not ugly. You are special, truly beautiful, and you weave your words like fragrant garlands from heavenly gardens though you may have written them under the most abject conditions while you worked as a housemaid, waitress and hotel chambermaid. I imagine you blushing now, Janet Frame. Jean! But didn't you yourself write it here, after reading one of Tolstoy"s masterpieces--

"There is a freedom born from the acknowledgement of greatness in literature, as if one gave away what one desired to keep, and in giving, there is a new space cleared for growth, an onrush of a new season beneath a secret sun. Acknowledging any great work of art is like being in love; one walks on air; any decline, destruction, death are within, not in the beloved; it is a falling in love with immortality, a freedom, a flight in paradise."? ...more

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Jun 27, 2013 Mariel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: dear everyone

Recommended to Mariel by: I was now erased from the earth

Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.

She looked how everyone saw her. Sometime after reading Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land late 2012 I watched some of the 1990s film adaptation by Jane Campion. I stopped watching it into the part from An Angel at my Table. Janet, Jean to her family, looked like everyone saw her. I couldn't h Temporary masks, I knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated.

She looked how everyone saw her. Sometime after reading Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-Land late 2012 I watched some of the 1990s film adaptation by Jane Campion. I stopped watching it into the part from An Angel at my Table. Janet, Jean to her family, looked like everyone saw her. I couldn't hear the inside of her head. The inside humming couldn't be hummed by me as she looks like she doesn't want you to notice her, just in case she isn't looking how she is supposed to look. If there is anything I missed the most about Frame it was that she talked to her reader as if they were an invisible friend. I hoped she wouldn't look at me here because I have had the horrible feeling that none of it would have happened to her if she had been pretty. She looked like Janet Frame with the shock of red hair, a love me smile, forgive me fading smile. The music bothered me. It felt quaint and it narrated outside of the body. New Zealand, sheep and sweaters. It wasn't like when you have a good song that lasts long enough inside of your head. The good "This could be the soundtrack to my life" head music feeling. You don't wear a forgive smile if you feel like this, while it lasts. It was cutesy and this is a movie about the past. The outside kind of ugly little girl, missing the inside oozing center of hope because you hug yourself when you hate your ugly self. The Janet that pretends she doesn't need to eat much because she likes the idea of herself as not a bother and then later sneaks chocolate into her room all the days because she can't admit that she actually has a pretty big appetite. The Janet that would look greedy thinking longingly of the chocolate bars later in her room. She's in the world that feels hungry and wants Janet to be the quiet girl who doesn't need anything more to eat. When she fills in the end of her teaching college autobiography paper about her suicide attempt. She hated school and teaching eats her half alive. It isn't wrong when she is the Janet that looks as if she doesn't know what is going to happen to her when she boasts to the inquisitive professor that the aspirin went down easily with water. I know from elsewhere (not from the book or the film) that the first three weeks turn into eight years of mental hospitals. She wanted to impress the doctors. She must have looked like something that didn't fit and they had some place to send people who didn't fit. I know she must have looked like someone you'd want to shake to not be so pathetic and please shut your mouth. Don't tell these doctors anything that would make them think you belong in the looney bin. Frame writes about her long and open letters to the doctor about her (apparently) schizophrenic symptoms of masturbation. I hear the outside voice in the book that knows she stopped writing to him when he gets married because she felt left out and must now know it was a sickening trap all along. If you saw her she'd just look silly. Would he look lofty, safe with a degree? Not to me, not in any world.

There's a moment between hospital stays when the film Janet looks exactly like Janet must have looked when she tells her sister she is going to be a writer. There's a hopeful look pinned to her chest. It is a badge and it is a secret wish. Janet Frame sounds like this a lot in An Angel at my Table. Writing saved her life. If she had not won a literary prize a new doctor from Scotland would not have thought to save her from the scheduled lobotomy. Stories were her life, a place to fit. She looks like a pompous idiot, like a little girl who dreams of rainbows and princes in the uninteresting Barbie doll variety. She probably talked about writing more than she actually did any writing most days (some days she types a meaningless sentence over and over to appear as if she is writing). She looks like the person who it is everything to and where did it take her I know more from her other books. It was beautiful, there, and I saw her.

I don't like the film Janet Frame because she is someone I would have pity for in the outside world. I like her, yet I want her to get a backbone because I'm drowning some days too. I would have to give her the dignity on my own if I saw her in the hospital to have her teeth removed. I know that Janet is terrified of the dentist. If I see her I don't forget that her teeth hurt because I can see them if she ever smiles. I can see them if she is afraid to smile. I feel the reason for the smile, bad teeth be damned, in her words.

There's a Janet Frame in her words that I missed desperately when watching her. The inner voice that stepped outside when she is ridiculous and face covered with chocolate. I'd love her anyway but this way she gets to love herself. That's better and worth more than coming from me because it is so hard to make that all of the time. The slight humorous twist to the smile that could be rueful when she is also conscious of how she must look to everyone else. I want that Janet Frame. Because you can't get that part of another person any other way. An Angel at my Table didn't have that Janet Frame. I was a jerk and was mad at the film for what the book didn't have. Frame sells her self esteem up the purple river of flowers. She acknowledges the loss of an "I" from her time in the asylums. Whenever she holds onto a rejection for her writing, or a successful publication of a poem... What I felt was the loss of her self-esteem. This writer guy says this, don't write this, read this. The other waitresses say wear this makeup, this dress. It is so painful to read this. I see the Janet Frame that her family doesn't know what to do with. They look like this is a crazy person. She writes about the relief when she pretends that it was a child's vacation. I know what she is doing and I miss so much when she gave herself something else in her fiction Faces in the Water and Owls Do Cry. I really miss it.

I experienced a feeling of nowhereness and nothingness as if I had never existed, or, if I had, I was now erased from the earth. I had somehow fallen into a crevice in time; and many of these feelings were a result of my being 'in touch' with no one, and of having no one to talk to from within. I was my usual smiling self, smiling, flashing my bulky new false teeth, and talking about this and that and daily matters. I wrote my poems, showing them to no one. A member of my family had found and read a story I wrote and voiced the strong opinion that I would never be a writer. Sometimes when I began to say what I really felt, using a simile or metaphor, an image, I saw the embarrassment in my listener's eyes - here was the mad person speaking.

There's a third part of the autobiography "The Envoy from the Mirror City". I have a bad feeling it is called this like when she sends a poem about mirrors and fractured images in response to a hospital doctor have they refuse financial assistance when she is released. The imagery chosen for its associations with schizophrenics. I'm afraid to read it if she is who they see her as and not as herself. In the end of part two she is following behind others, still afraid of her own voice. It kills me. When she writes about how other writers don't have to prove that their fiction isn't autobiographical with the absence of lobotomy scars I wanted to tell her that that wasn't the worst that they did to her. It is when she says in the beginning of the book that she admires the little worlds the other patients built for themselves in the rules. It is that she is afraid of ever getting out of them with anyone, not that people look at her like she is crazy. It isn't that she doesn't open her mouth for herself it is that she doesn't miss that she doesn't. I have a feeling that the fictional heroine of Faces in the Water who stands up to the nurses is where Frame got to be brave. If you are so afraid of what other people look like when they are looking at you that you cannot make an expression. That's what Janet Frame looks like in An Angel at My Table. I don't like that look at all. It breaks my heart. What I loved about her so much in Faces in the Water is that she gave to other people by wanting to see something good when she looked at them, not the worst. It felt like she was giving that to herself too by doing that. That's why so much of this book is about being a writer. The identity part of being a writer was too damned important. I didn't like that about this book at all. Because being a writer was what she thought would make her look good to someone else. I still haven't finished watching the film. I want to have an intimate inner voice talking to me. I don't want to feel lonely watching someone else being lonely and it is up to me to be good and just know that there's something real and better to it. I have to, though. I'm not good enough today.
...more

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May 12, 2014 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2014 , nonfiction

So.

Is it blasphemy to say that I prefer her nonfiction to her fiction?
Her fiction was dense, poetic, experimental—all of which I fully appreciate.
Her autobiography is just her truth, which I absolutely love. This resonated so much with me. It's one of those books that says exactly what I would want to say to the world if I'd had the presence of mind to say it first.

She was diagnosed with schizophrenia but wasn't schizophrenic. She was autistic if ever a woman was.

So…
If you'd like to hear a liter ...more

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Jan 15, 2012 Eric rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I confess that I came to this book only after seeing Jane Campion's brilliant film adaptation of Janet Frame's autobiographies. And, despite telling essentially the same story, the book and the film feel like wildly different things. That's the nature of an adaptation, of course; and I'm not suggesting that Campion is somehow less faithful to her source material than other directors might be. It's just that Campion's film is perhaps more masterful, more finely crafted. Which does not take anythi ...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Margherita Dolcevita rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

E' una delle autobiografie più belle che abbia mai letto. Divisa in tre parti estremamente diverse tra loro, è un'esplosione di vitalità, di forza, di coraggio. Non è un libro semplice, è molto lungo e l'ambientazione neozelandese è molto lontana dai nostri standard; le riflessioni sulla scrittura sono imperdibili, davvero un ottimo libro.

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Aug 09, 2011 Barbro Kinnunen added it

Shelves: bokklubben

Extra-ordinary life and writing style. She goes from a very realistic and straight on language to the most poetic descibtions of ordinary thing that I have ever read. Some strophes needs to be read twice or trice to even comprehend and absorb. A book to read for all :-) !

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Sep 28, 2007 Alison rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the second volume in a trilogy of autobiographies by New Zealand writer Janet Frame, covering about ten years in the 1940s between the time she leaves school and sets off for London. Her description of surviving eight years spent in mental institutions as a result of being mistakenly diagnosed with schizophrenia, is horrifying, but also compelling. I love Janet Frame's novels; her writing is beautiful, complex, and she just seems to turn language inside out. From that point of view alone ...more

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Jan 20, 2013 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: Bettie, Carey

Shelves: audio-books , memoir-biography , new-zealand-authors , health-issues , read-2013

From BBC Radio 4 - Classical Serial:
Dramatisation by Anita Sullivan of the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame.

Coming up in January 13.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q1h1m

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Aug 11, 2011 Ruth Brittain added it

A wonderful autobiography.....sad, funny and unforgettable....a brilliant author of the utmost sensitivity.....

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Jan 27, 2015 Lindz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century , self-musings , just-good-writing , kiwi , feminin-wiles

Wandering through my favourite book store I saw that they had reissued Frame's series of autobiography. I was suddenly very embarrassed that I had never read one of New Zealand's greatest authors, being a kiwi myself. So I bought it.

From the first line;

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth Wandering through my favourite book store I saw that they had reissued Frame's series of autobiography. I was suddenly very embarrassed that I had never read one of New Zealand's greatest authors, being a kiwi myself. So I bought it.

From the first line;

"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."

I knew I was in the hands of a master, and suddenly very proud to be kiwi.

Frame is famous for being the ultimate miss understood artist. Considering she spend almost ten years of her life in and out of mental hospitals with miss diagnosed schizophrenia. And only missed out on having a lobotomy because she won a literary prize. Though don't expect great details of her asylum experience, she has already written about it in another novel, and will not go through it again.

This is a autobiography not of bitterness, maybe a little sadness but more matter of fact. From a poor childhood in Otago, with tragedy to her struggling to be herself, in a society that expected that she should toe the line. In NZ in the 1950's you were either a nurse or a teacher, or you played rugby. Females tended to have more choice, but not much :).

Though I love this auto I cannot give this 5 stars only because the last instalment 'The Envoy from the Mirror City' just did not hold up to the previous two autos. It felt like Frame was more dictating the events, there wasn't the flavour. Which is a little sad. But I would still recommend this novel to anyone, not just kiwis. ...more

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May 10, 2013 Kim Pertinence rated it 5 of 5 stars

i felt encouraged by the, now almost unheard about, close family knit, and how everyday pragmatism enabled way more than the modicum of secure relationships that psychiatric hospitals try to provide but are far from sustainable, the madding artificial crowd of a clinical environment that was only ever meant to be a temporary measure. unfortunately, temporary measures are now a way of life and core, nuclear family values have been nuked instead of tweaked by the social engineers responsible for o ...more

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Oct 12, 2013 Della O'Shea rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Writing an auto biography, usually thought of as looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an X-ray quality to the eye. Also, time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated, with the host resembling the character in the fairytale who was joined along the route by more and more characters, none of whom could be separated from one another, or from the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain. Add to the charact ...more

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Jul 18, 2014 Tina Cousins rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's a curious read, very interesting in parts, very disturbing in others and very poetic (literally). However, if you can excuse the pun, you have to be in the frame of mind to read this book for prolonged periods, as it can be quite depressing - to me, this is the sort of book you have to read a little of for a couple of days and come back to in a couple of weeks in order for you not to get sucked into this world of sadness.

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Nov 20, 2014 Steven rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites , women

Great autobiography of Janet Frame - one of those books you discover by chance that turns out to be a masterpiece.

Janet became a Nobel-prize winning writer but was hours away from being lobotomized as a schizophrenic. Then again if you write novels about people sitting catatonically and talking to black beetles ...

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Jan 13, 2014 Caroline Barron rated it 3 of 5 stars

Frame clung to words as if they were a rope dangling from a cliff; and barely survived. She disguised her tumultuous inner world with fashionable-leftism, but ultimately couldn't keep up the facade, and in 1943 attempted suicide. She survived, in part by being rescued by an angel (New Zealand author Frank Sargeson) who took her in, fed her and most importantly, gave her a room in which to write her precious words.

Serendipitously, next week, a memorial will be held for my best friend's wonderful Frame clung to words as if they were a rope dangling from a cliff; and barely survived. She disguised her tumultuous inner world with fashionable-leftism, but ultimately couldn't keep up the facade, and in 1943 attempted suicide. She survived, in part by being rescued by an angel (New Zealand author Frank Sargeson) who took her in, fed her and most importantly, gave her a room in which to write her precious words.

Serendipitously, next week, a memorial will be held for my best friend's wonderful father Chris Cathcart - who directed some of Sargeson's plays in the 60s - at that very property in Esmonde Rd, Auckland. I am looking forward to celebrating Chris' life, and to seeing the place where so much creative genius happened.

I was fascinated by Frame's description of mental institutions in the 1940s and 1950s and horrified by the techniques (including not bothering to interview your patient at all, electric shock therapy and scheduling a lobotomy). Frame narrowly escaped a lobotomy when her book of short stories won a literary award. Frame is retrospectively pragmatic about these years. It will be interesting to see if it was distance and time that allowed this pragmatism, and if perhaps her fiction is more despondent.

The book takes its name from Rilke's beautiful, hopeful poem 'Angels':

Stay still, if suddenly
the Angel chooses your table:
softly smooth the wrinkles
in the cloth beneath your bread.

Offer up your own few bites,
so he can have his taste,
and he can lift to his pure lips
a simple glass of all your days.

Favorite Quotes:
"My family appeared like tired ghosts trying to come to life for the occasion, both Mother and Dad were still pursued by toil . . . The attentive habits of my parents saddened, pleased and infuriated me, leaving me with a feeling of helplessness - what could I do for them? I could see the pattern of their past lives slowly emerging, like a script written with invisible ink and now being made visible to me, warmed by the fire kindled simply by my growing up. I could see, too, an illumination produced by that same fire, the shadows emerging as recognized shapes of a language full of meaning for me: the language of the love and loss and joy and torture of having a place fast within a family when all my awakening longing was directed towards being uprooted, quickly, without leaving behind a cluster of nerve endings, broken threads in danger of being renewed." (46)

" I remember the happiness and recognise it as one of the rewards of alliance with any great work of art, as if ordinary people were suddenly called upon to see the point of view of angels" (35) ...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Charlotte rated it 5 of 5 stars

A beaufitully written biography with some poetry which led Jane Campion to make a movie out of it with the same title. 500 pages of absolute pleasure. Janet Frame was from New Zealand 1924-2004. One of the very few books I will definitely read again.

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Aug 09, 2015 Charles Yee rated it 3 of 5 stars

The first volume of the autobiography was a little dry, but my interest was aroused when Janet Frame touched on the traumatic phase of her her life as an inmate in a mental hospital in the second volume, the once dull language became lyrical, with plenitude of feelings to which I can relate, for I was too, diagnosed with a mental illness several years ago. My favourite is volume three, the part where the writer sounded more optimistic towards life as a tourist in Europe. She overcame her introve ...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Yvette rated it 4 of 5 stars

Janet Frame is required reading. One of the best writers to come out of New Zealand, this is one of her best, what it is to be female and 'mad' and live in New Zealand.

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May 17, 2013 Bronwyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this when it first came out - remember waiting impatiently for it to do so, and I wasn't disappointed.
I have the 3 in the set and it's time to read them again!

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May 24, 2012 Esther Bradley-detally rated it 5 of 5 stars

i read this years back; i loved the film - Jane Campion; Janet Frame's life is one of courage, and gives other writers hpe.

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May 21, 2008 Paul Grimsley rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: the-ones-you-have-to-read

a brilliant, sad, compelling and beautiful story. this is one of the best autobiography's i have ever read.

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Nov 19, 2012 East Library UWCSEA rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: a-adults , g-ib-world-lit-reads , multiple-copies-available

The memoir of Janet Frame, one of New Zealand's most famous authors. Made into a movie in 1990.

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Jan 28, 2013 Marni McClure rated it 4 of 5 stars

Watched the series in New Zealand & was very excited to get my hands on a copy.

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Sep 04, 2015 Marina rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction , new-zealand

I decided to read this book after reading (and loving) Faces in the Water . I am extremely interested in books about mental illness/mental health, so I was intrigued to know more about the actual life of the author. I knew she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had later found out she had never had it instead, and I was very curious to read about this.

Instead, I found something different, something which doesn't concentrate so much on Frame's apparent illness. This is good in a way, becau I decided to read this book after reading (and loving) Faces in the Water . I am extremely interested in books about mental illness/mental health, so I was intrigued to know more about the actual life of the author. I knew she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had later found out she had never had it instead, and I was very curious to read about this.

Instead, I found something different, something which doesn't concentrate so much on Frame's apparent illness. This is good in a way, because certainly she was much more than that, especially given the fact that she has never suffered from schizophrenia in the first place. But Frame spent 8 years in mental hospitals, and I would have expected she had delved more in this part of the story. Instead, she says she has already told about it in Faces in the Water , even though in that case it was fictionalized, so she doesn't repeat herself. I would have liked to know the un-fictionalized part of the story, instead.

Also, the story of her life is pretty dull, especially for one who hasn't read and appreciated all of her books, but has limited herself to only one.

What is worse, she comes out as a whiner of sorts. She is labelled as schizophreniac after attempting suicide, so she starts reading everything she can about the disease, which is understandable. But then she starts, not exaggerating her symptoms, but actually feigning them, which I found loathsome. I'm talking as a person who is actually struggling with mental illness (though not schizophrenia, thank god), and I find this really demeaning of people who actually suffer from mental illnesses. Moreover, Frame sees then that her attempts at feigning an illness brings her to hospital, but she doesn't stop. Of course she definitely had some problems, but I think all this is pretty crazy, actually.

I know Frame's fans will hate me for this review, but I really didn't like this book. I will limit myself to reading her novels in future. ...more

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Jun 22, 2015 Nadeya rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Con questo libro la Frame ci conduce in un viaggio, o meglio un'esplorazione, all'interno di se stessa, svelandoci, con semplicità e modestia, i suoi lati più oscuri, le sue paure e le sue vittorie, a partire dalla infanzia fino alla maturità. Ci svela il senso di inadeguatezza che l'ha accompagnata per tutta la vita, ed il costante tentativo, portato avanti con coraggio e determinazione, di affermare se stessa, il suo insolito aspetto fisico e la sua diversità di aspettative ed intenti rispetto ...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Ilana rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

The parts I liked about this book: the story of a young woman trying to find herself, the importance of place in that process, descriptions of a writer encountering writing that changes her, what it means to have a misunderstood mental illness, the difficulty of overcoming the great desire to concede to others' expectations, finally finding yourself ready to take the journey you didn't even think you wanted to go on.

The parts I did not like about this book: it was paced too slowly for me--I kept ...more

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Jun 21, 2010 Alison rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Just finished Vol. 3: The Envoy From Mirror City, which I liked best of all three. This may have something to do with the fact that between reading this one and the first two I rewatched the Jane Campion film, which I enjoyed (though there were some things Campion took artistic license with that I think were bad choices), and watching the film gave me a new appreciation. Or, it might be that the third volume was the best. Or, it might be that I grew up and became a better reader or something. Or ...more

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Jan 09, 2015 Jennifer rated it 1 of 5 stars

I really disliked the book and would never have read it, but I had to for a university course. I couldn't connect to Janet Frame at all and her constant whining really annoyed me. She had nothing to whine about, there are much more people worse off than her. And when she started to exaggerate her schizophrenia symptoms, I nearly threw the book in the bin. I just cannot understand what all the fuss is about. Sorry, but this is the most boring and worst book I've ever read.

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Nov 02, 2010 Michael Armijo rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Janet Frame gives us good reason to "WRITE".

Janet Frame was an amazing woman. She died on Jan 30, 2004. I had this book on my 'need to read' shelf when I read an obituary in the NY Times about her death at age 79. She endured so much and wrote so keenly. She was thought to be a schizophrenic and wrote about her periods of madness in mental institutions. This autobiography was fascinating for me. There is a gentleness and everlasting patience about her that will make anyone like her. If you want ...more

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Mental Health Boo...: August B.O.T.M	7	15	Aug 19, 2015 01:32AM
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Janet Frame -- Too Good for This World?	1	5	Jan 19, 2014 06:00PM

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About Janet Frame

The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her alm ...more

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“All writers--all beings--are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force...All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..” — 19 likes

“...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.” — 10 likes

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