This autobiographical series delves into the author's formative years in New Zealand, portraying a childhood and adolescence within a family that was materially poor yet intellectually intense. It vividly details her early encounters with love, death, and the world of words, particularly poetry. The narratives capture profound inner experiences and the shaping of an artistic soul amidst a unique environment.
An Autobiography
"[This book] is [an] ... account of a childhood and adolescence in a New Zealand family in the 1920s and 1930s. ... Its ... language brings alive in vivid detail her home, materially poor but intellectually intense, and her first encounters with love and death. It follows [Frame's] explorations into the worlds of words and poetry. ..."--Back cover
Librarian note: Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0586085866 This is the second volume in Janet Frame's autobiography, in which she tells of how she left the close-knit family home in Oamaru for teacher training college in Dunedin. Her college years were a time of intense loneliness that culminated in an attempted suicide and commital to a mental institution. Labelled as a schizophrenic, Janet spent eight harrowing years in psychiatric hospitals until the publication of her prize-winning collection of stories won her a discharge.
After being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman, Janet Frame spent several years in psychiatric institutions. She escaped undergoing a lobotomy when it was discovered that she had just won a national literary prize. She then went on to become New Zealand's most acclaimed writer. As she says more than once in this autobiography: 'My writing saved me.'