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To the Is-land: An Autobiography (Janet Frame Autobiography #1)

by Janet Frame

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 353 ratings · 17 reviews

In this first volume of her autobiography, New Zealand novelist Janet Frame tells of her childhood as the daughter of an impoverished railway worker and a mother who aspired to publish poetry.

Despite material privations and family conflicts, the world of the imagination was accorded a supreme place in the Frame household, and it was at this time that Janet Frame acquired h ...more

Hardcover , 195 pages

Published October 1st 1982 by George Braziller (first published 1982)

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Nov 15, 2012 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommends it for: what does ugly mean?

Recommended to Mariel by: I'm gonna plant a tree and let it rise out of the fury

I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden street, and not force me to exist in an 'elsewhere'. I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Glen street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden street, and not force me to exist in an 'elsewhere'. I wanted the light to shine upon the pigeons of Glen street, the plum trees in our garden, the two japonica bushes (one red, one yellow), our pine plantations and gully, our summer house, our lives, and our home, the world of Oamaru, the kingdom by the sea. I refused to accept that if I were to fulfil my secret ambition to be a poet, I should spend my imaginative life among the nightingales instead of among the wax-eyes and the fantails. I wanted my life to be the 'other world'.

My favorite word is "arabesques". If I see this word in a story my eyes will stop on the page and follow in my mind's eye patterns in sun spots and spilled oil on concrete. I lose time for I don't know how long. I did this before I was quite certain if that is what the word meant. I like that the word "arabesque" doesn't mean those complex mental paths in images that I can see. It's even more like when I have a thought without words at all and the word can hint at what is there. "Arabesque" reminds me of that feeling. I'm not rustling up words from the English language (something I don't begin to know how to get them to belong to me) to flow with my mind (something I don't begin to know how to get them to belong to someone else). I don't need anything else to weave those pictures.

When I looked up the official definition I discovered that "arabesque" also means a ballet posture to bend the body forward from the hip with one arm extended and the other arm and leg extended backward. In the past I have been sorta "fixated" on wrestling moves to describe some feeling or another. Recently I read a Roland Barthes essay about wrestling. I'm not sure that I agree that wrestling represents the fight of good versus evil. I just liked that the poses could mean breaking out of something. Not the whole play. Symbols rather than a beacon, maybe. I'll have to try out this arabesque pose some day and see if I can see a whole dance from this place. I probably won't so I can keep the idea that maybe I would.

That's what I thought of when thinking about how to describe how I felt about Janet Frame's first autobiography To the Is-land. I remember at first wondering about the strange kind of nostalgia for something you miss when you are living the worst that has ever happened to you. Even if the worst that has ever happened to you is over, missing the halcyon days is an opening to also return to the worst that has ever happened to you. I've never used this word "halcyon" before. Frame uses it often in "Is-land". I know what it means. It doesn't make me miss any days so I don't use it. I get embarrassed in real life speech and constantly switch out my words for other ones when I am asked to repeat myself. Nothing is right so it is silence. I know what other words mean. They are not attached to a breathing memory. To go back means the worst is ahead of you again too. That's how it is in my mind. Is there a word that means to kill nostalgia? I would have lost any way back to childhood if I had been through what Frame went through when she was locked up in an asylum for a decade. I don't really think about that now. She was longing to find the words to make places for herself. Frame had her words that prism-ed what she wanted to see like if anything ever happened outside of me when I retreated inside at the first sight of "arabesque".

To the Is-land is my fourth Janet Frame book. The epileptic brother (helpless in real life, and a resented sucking black hole of unfair normal in fiction. I guess you wouldn't notice him a bit if you felt you belonged) and the older sister who tragically dies young (were they going to be as close as sisters can be as the Myrtle in memory was to her? The fictional sister was leaving in life) were in Owls Do Cry. Janet Frame didn't write down what happened. They are related might have-beens, another way to live through what you had to live through, dark shadows of doubt. I noticed in two of her books, Towards Another Summer (the work that was too personal for Frame to have published herself) and Faces in the Water, a reluctance to touch the secret place. A woman finds her living poem in nature and never returns to it again. Living poem isn't at all what I wanted to say. Damn it. I was happy that Frame did have that bit of unspoiled beauty and allowed herself to be in it, unspoiled by it herself. Her life isn't a sanctuary in her writing. The words must have led to these what-ifs. I have said this times before that I love Janet Frame for willing to see in others what she would want the light to shine on her "elsewhere". It's not hiding. I guess she was afraid of her own might have beens. Owls Do Cry swallowed down like just desserts medicine if Mary Poppins just gave you store bought icky syrup that doesn't go down in the most delicious way.

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 of truth and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.

To the Is-land is about the Frame family, in a way. Not really. I loved the story of when they met their mother's mother for the first time. Their soft-heart mother who could never discipline her rowdy brood. She talked up big time how wonderful her own mother was, how they would all be the best of friends. The reality wasn't anything like that. Their grandmother complained about them from the first and they were not the best of friends. I liked that they saw it that their mother wasn't going to be able to pretend about her past anymore. I liked that they appreciated her somewhat more, yet didn't change a thing about taking advantage of her or their rowdiness. The family were very poor. Some periods of their life were looked on with all of the nostalgia from a person who would use "halcyon" a lot could muster. When Janet gets a scholarship to use the library after winning a poetry contest the family get access to books for the first time. I could read about this kind of stuff forever and be happy. (Anyone who spends this much time on goodreads must get some kind of a kick out of vicarious reading, right?) It was sad when the sister who dies, Myrtle, has sex at the age of twelve with the older brother of Janet's best friend (it was only a matter of time considering previous mentions of men getting obsessed with the poor girl). Both girls rat them out without really knowing what they are doing and as a result Janet (she's nicknamed Jean but I can't seem to make myself think of her that way) is forbidden from ever seeing her friend again. I loved the self sacrificing pity she goes about this with. Years later they still adhere to this restriction and whenever their paths cross it is the dramatic play of BEST friends ripped apart. It would have been sad if these two girls weren't the sort to enjoy that sort of thing so very much. It could be the best thing that ever happened to them. Frame writes about herself and her main characters with this wonderful way that I can't describe in the right way. It's something close to tongue in cheek, a way to relish the way down. A way of stepping outside of your own body and prematurely rendering "It's too painful to be funny now!" into a timeless way of the future and the past happening at the same time. It's both funny now and it'll never be funny and I'll never be old enough to laugh about it now. I loved it when a lady on the street gives her two pence (I forget what New Zealand money is. My mind may be erroneously converting it to British money) and she spends it on cough lollipops. They had chloroform in them and she gets really sick. That reminded me of when I was a desperate sugar fiend at the age of four and ate all of my mother's artificial sweetener (I have memories of childhood poverty too. It somehow always seems cozier in stories than it ever was in reality). Little blue packets littered the floor and I was filthy. I felt like a monster when I was discovered (what do they expect when they teach kids to love the Cookie Monster?). Janet Frame is the sort of person to write about herself in this way and not try to make herself look either good or bad. I imagine that the effect she was going for was the timeless laughing/not laughing at the same time. Anyone who has known me for long enough here knows that my standards for memoirs demands this. I'm trusted to be there myself this way. I can't see a reason (a good reason) to write a memoir otherwise.

To the Is-land is "about" Frame's poetic beginnings. I have no idea how she did it. I don't know how she survived what they did to her in those hell holes of New Zealand mental asylums and threats of future swallowing bad memories around the corners of their imprisoning walls. To come out of it with her soul in tact is the secret place for me. The well spring of where the words go to mean anything that is going to feel true. It's a memoir about what was important to her about this in her, the place to go that I don't even have another word for than I like "arabesque". I knew that it was important to her to have that look. I know that her faith in herself was not as open as what she would will for others. I know that she wrote about other places it could go because it wasn't always possible to stretch out past their darkening grasp. This happened before all of that. Young Janet Frame wanted to be a poet. She knew that people would give her awards if she used the word "dream" a lot. A favorite teacher taught her that there was poetry in math. You don't have to go somewhere else. You could find it in your own backyard, as that one girl who liked to dream found out the hard way. Speaking of Dorothy, actually, I think young me first heard of mental institutions and electric shock treatments (Frame was given these over 200 times) when I viewed the 1980s film Return to Oz as a child (it was one of my favorites). Day dreamers don't always do so well. I heard a lot that I should try to be normal. No word still on what that is. Maybe I'd better work on my vocabulary, huh? In prewar New Zealand it wasn't too different than I'd expect now. Be born knowing what everyone wants to hear. Have money. What do people want to hear? I don't know! Help you if you guess wrong, help you if you don't guess something better for yourself. Okay, so I don't know the HOW she had it. She already did. Like Dorothy with home and Dumbo with his feathers it was probably already in her with that wonderful will to look at all the possible shadows. I know that I freaking love Janet Frame. She's my arabesque. Don't know what it means but I can see it. I want the feather too.

Sometimes Frame frustrates me because I know too well the exhaustion of being ones self for too long. If you can't stand yourself it is like feeling that inside of someone else. I envy her poetry and I'm still oh so glad that I am not her. The school jumpers didn't fit. Other girls came from families that didn't have money too. I wish that she had more opportunities in her life to not notice that she didn't fit in (or felt she didn't fit in. There's not much difference if that is your conviction). This must have been the best days of her life because it isn't tiring save for the foreboding feeling you get when you hear someone dismiss someone else that high school was the best four years of their life. No way! But... it's over. For real? Pity, memories of what your own four years were like (not the best). In Owls Do Cry I had the feeling that it would be the best no matter what happened, in spite of what really happened, because the sister was still alive, and in an amputated way. She just misses Myrtle. The anxiety is for the future, when she's gone. I guess I'm back to thinking about how can you remember the past when what comes up is a prison.... It's not nostalgia. Death? I would mumble and say something else if asked to repeat this review. I'm really not feeling too in tune with words and expressions. I'm in my bull shit review phase (wish that'd end already). I mean it that I love Janet Frame. I miss that tip of the tongue feeling I had when I was thinking about how to describe it. I kind of wish that I hadn't tried so arabesque would still mean all kinds of things in my head when connecting Janet Frame novels with Janet Frame autobiographies. ...more

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Dec 11, 2007 Melody rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Melody by: Rachel C

Shelves: memoirs-and-biographies , new-zealand

Janet Frame, one of New Zealand's best-known writers, remembers her early years in dreamy, thought-swimming sentences, chock-full of poetic, strung-together adjectives. Her family is made up of her father who "was inclined to dourness with a strong sense of formal behavior that did not allow him the luxury of reminiscence"; her mother whose "titties were always there, like the cow's teats for an occasional squirt into our mouths"; Bruddie, her brother who (poor thing) developed epilepsy and had ...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites , nonfiction

I love Janet Frame. I just love her. I feel as though she could be a member of my family.

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Aug 03, 2011 Lynda Spadaccini rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

have read it before and am reading it again. The amazing Ms Frame captures her depressive, difficult childhood with ease . The isolation both geographically and internally is beautifully explored, with perfectly placed observations on how a young Ms Frame dealt with the world sround her.

Finished now, such an inspiring woman, so quirky and honest. I have a crush on her ... again.

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Feb 15, 2011 Patricia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir-biography

"I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street." Her book stands up to this hope. It's a concrete, tangible life story lit up by her humor, intelligence, and compassion.

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Jan 02, 2014 Caroline Barron rated it 4 of 5 stars

On this perfect little New Zealand is-land (sic) - Waiheke - I met Janet Frame for the first time. Reading Frame is like coming home - walking through paddocks in bare feet, over the stile and to the house where Dad is doing the crossword in front of the range. I'm not sure how I have got this far through life, as a literature-loving New Zealander, without stumbling into her at the library, in class, or by being introduced by friends.

A quick look on Wikipedia reminded me of her poetically tragic ...more

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Aug 27, 2013 Dara Salley rated it 4 of 5 stars

At first I couldn’t remember why I added this book to my “to-read” list. Then I remember that it was because I saw the amazing movie “An Angel at My Table”. The movie shows the life of Janet Frame and dramatizes various parts of her three autobiographical novels. I found her story very compelling. She was a woman who grew up in poverty in New Zealand. She finds an outlet for her imagination by writing poetry and eventually becomes a world-acclaimed poet. First she has to overcome many obstacles At first I couldn’t remember why I added this book to my “to-read” list. Then I remember that it was because I saw the amazing movie “An Angel at My Table”. The movie shows the life of Janet Frame and dramatizes various parts of her three autobiographical novels. I found her story very compelling. She was a woman who grew up in poverty in New Zealand. She finds an outlet for her imagination by writing poetry and eventually becomes a world-acclaimed poet. First she has to overcome many obstacles including rotting teeth and long-term imprisonment in the worst kind of mental asylum the 60’s had to offer.

All that comes in her second novel, ‘The Angel at My Table’. That book is the most popular one in the trilogy. ‘To the Is-Land’ is the first book and it covers her life from birth until graduation from high school. She writes about her childhood experiences and impressions with great vividness. Her account reminded me a bit of ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce. Both writers employ a disjointed, dreamlike prose to describe the feeling of childhood.

I enjoyed learning about the inspirations and events that led to her becoming a poet. I have never been able to appreciate poetry. A year ago I read “Understanding Poetry”, a textbook aimed at introducing novices to poetry. Even though I read it cover-to-cover and enjoyed it, I still have not been able to enjoy reading poetry. Frame discusses her nascent love of poetry and the combination of influences that set her on the path to becoming a renowned poet. It’s obvious that she had natural talent. She lists with pride all the poetry and literature competitions she won as a child.

But more importantly, she talks about the songs, poems and rhymes that captured her imagination. Certain phrases would stick in her mind and play over repetitively. These phrases helped her relate to the world around her. Certain poetic phrases would evoke a person, a time of year or an event. She begins to create her own phrases to describe her life. Frame is very frank about the quality of her early childhood poems. She mocks her reliance on standard poetic words and phrases. It is fascinating to read her account of her awkward transformation from childish poet into an artist. Frame lived an extraordinary life and possessed the skill to record her life vividly. I can’t wait to read the second volume of her autobiography.
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May 30, 2015 Rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars

Aggghh. Janet Frame is truly a national treasure and I'm only just beginning to comprehend it.

This memoir is so, so great. The author's experience of art, literature, time, and her articulation of artistic, individual and national identity is ... hauntingly personal and exquisite. Also, I don't think many (if any) books are capable of making me want to re-engage with regional NZ / Southland lol. But this has!!!!

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Jan 14, 2014 Kathleen Dixon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-autobiography-memoirs , nz , n-z-author

A work colleague loaned me a good number of Janet Frame's novels some years ago. If I recall, there was only one that I particularly enjoyed (I wasn't keeping records so diligently then), but I kept reading them because I felt sure I was going to really love another. The thing is, I love her prose - she puts words together beautifully - but I the novels difficult, mostly.

This first volume of the three-volume autobiography, on the other hand, has appealed to me enormously. Here, in the story of h ...more

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Feb 18, 2014 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical , english

Was an okay book, took a bit to get in to and I don't particularly like the life that she describes it's depressing.

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May 28, 2013 Pip rated it 4 of 5 stars

I loved this autobiography. Janet Frame takes us from the innocence of childhood into a self conscious adolescence. A great portrayal of family and sisterhood. The family struggles with poverty and makes the most out of small things and events. Janet is transported by literature and brings a romantic interpretation to her landscape.

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Nov 08, 2008 april violet marked it as to-read

Shelves: non-fiction , to-be-finished-one-day

I made it halfway through this book before I returned it to the library. I suppose I'm not in the right frame (pardon the pun) of mind for it. Janet Frame's prose is a bit plain here compared to that in her fiction.

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May 17, 2013 Bronwyn rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this when it first came out and was captivated - then had to wait impatiently for the next volume
I have the 3 in the set and it's time to read them again!

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Apr 02, 2013 Ellen marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Read Sarah's review:I she says that there is lots of poetic writing. Maybe liz would enjoy this book.

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Nov 26, 2013 Chloe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: borrowed , school , non-fiction , 2013

I read this for a speech exam quite a while ago, but I did actually enjoy it much more than I expected.

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Jul 23, 2015 Alison rated it 5 of 5 stars

At first I hated it. Then I realized it was genius. Good god, what an idiot I used to be!

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Apr 24, 2010 Edward Sargisson rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Quite good. Better than most autobiographies. She is a writer after all.

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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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