An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame Autobiography #2

by Janet Frame

Una de las grandes autobiografías del siglo XX.

Un ángel en mi mesa reúne los tres volúmenes de una de las obras más singulares y atractivas de la literatura contemporánea, la autobiografía de Janet «La cautivadora e intensa trilogía de Frame es una de las más grandes autobiografías jamás escritas, un relato del crecimiento de una escritora que, tomada por loca, descubrió justo a tiempo su verdadera identidad de genio», The Guardian.

Frame pasó su infancia en la mágica Nueva Zelanda, en un ambiente de pobreza pero muy rico intelectualmente. Fue en esos años, marcados por la tragedia, cuando descubrió el poder transformador de la palabra. Amenazada por la sombra de la locura, a los veintiún años empezó un periplo por varios hospitales psiquiátricos, donde le diagnosticaron erróneamente esquizofrenia. Cuando estaban a punto de realizarle una lobotomía, ganó uno de los más importantes premios literarios neozelandeses y anularon la operación.

Esta hermosa autobiografía constituye una experiencia humana, artística e intelectual inolvidable. Constante celebración del poder de la imaginación, estas páginas ofrecen un testimonio del crecimiento de una escritora, pero son también el relato de la lucha de una mujer por sobrevivir a su mundo interior, a veces brutal y sombrío, pero siempre bello.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Autobiography, Female Authors, Mental Health, Biography Memoir

195 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

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 almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.

She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years.

Reviews

[JimZ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was pleasantly unusual...I enjoyed this book so much after being so disappointed in the first-of-her three memoirs (this is the second of the three). I was puzzled after reading the first memoir, ‘To the Is-Land’, as to why Michael Holroyd from the Sunday Times would write that this three-memoir series was ‘one of the greatest autobiographies written this century’....and he weas writing about the 20th century. High praise indeed and I thought inflated and off-the-mark. Well, now I am not so sure....this was a mighty fine memoir indeed! 🙂 🙃

Janet Frame as far as I know in her first memoir made no mention of her upcoming stay in mental institutions for a significant part of her third decade in life (from 21 years old to about 29 years old). That in itself would not have elevated that memoir to my mind any higher than the two stars I gave it. But I was not impressed with Janet Frame at the end of the first memoir. At the end of the second memoir I felt quite sorry for Janet Frame, but was heartened that things were looking up. What a hardscrabble life growing up as a kid and teen, and early adulthood. That is when she apparently had a real problem with shyness...I’m not sure what one would call it (I’m sure I will be enlightened by reviews), but she ended up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia although no psychiatrist ever thoroughly examined her. It appears she nearly missed a lobotomy by a week...I think she was scheduled for it, but at the last moment it was cancelled because a doctor was aware she in the mental institution but also aware her first collection of short stories (The Lagoon and Other Stories) had been published (he was the first one to break that news to her). If she had had that operation, there would have been no autobiography. Still, she had had over 200 episodes of electroconvulsive ‘treatments’...she wrote that it did irreparable damage to her memory.

She really does not dwell to any great extent on her incarcerations in different mental institutions, but what she does divulge sounds truly awful.

She was really embarrassed by her teeth as a teenager and young adult. She has all her teeth pulled when she was still in her early 20s....by then they were supposedly all rotten and decayed and she was constantly hiding her teeth. The things we take for granted nowadays.

I wrote down some passages while reading . This was near the end of the book, and I thought it was just “clever”...she was in conversation with her Aunt Polly...
• ‘He’s someone. you know,’ Aunt Polly used to say. I never hear her say of a person. ‘He’s no one’, but she did imply that not everybody was somebody.
Got that? 😉

I do look forward to reading the third and final memoir...I go in with some trepidation because I don’t know how it can be as good as this one!

Reviews
• I couldn’t find any. All the reviews were on Jane Campion’s movie, ‘An Angel at My Table’ which got rave reviews (e.g., https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/an... ).

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder if Stephen King read this book – see if this reminds you of a famous chilling scene. A well-known writer has given Janet a little shed to do her writing in :

I was amazed and grateful at his acceptance of me as a writer doing daily work, particularly as I had not yet begun to write the novel I planned, and on some mornings I was so anxious to appear to be working that I typed The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.



*

Autobiographies are claustrophobic books, you only get this one single perspective, that of the author about herself, and maybe you aren’t getting the full picture. There were several nagging things that Janet Frame was not telling me about how she ended up spending eight years in a New Zealand mental hospital and how she came very close to getting a lobotomy. It seems at certain moments of maximum stress she would like Hamlet pretend to be mad but she doesn’t describe exactly how. Once labelled as a schizophrenic it seems nobody, no doctor or nurse, ever noticed that she wasn’t actually schizophrenic, for eight long years! That is some remarkably indifferent lazy nasty medical staff. If you think of other autobiographies of psychologically damaged people, like Girl Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen or God Head by Scott Zwiren, you’ll see a similar thing : the patient always think the doctors and staff are either uncaring or actually hostile to them. The movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the same.

Psychiatric staff get this truly bad rap from all these books and films. The patients never think that the staff want to help them. They are always seen as malevolent. Surely they can’t all have been this bad?

I’ve ordered the biography of Janet Frame called Wresting with the Angel by Michael King in the hope that this will throw some light on the strange sad history of her terrible misdiagnosis.
Meanwhile – this is a very poignant book which I rattled through in two days. It reveals in gruesome detail the chasms of ignorance a workingclass person has to cope with as they try to find their way up the educational ladder.

This isn't the cheeriest book, but it's strange and hypnotic and unique.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so much easier and much more interesting to read than volume one - and I think I can indicate why. The voice is confidant. In volume two Frame "relaxes" - she has dropped the defensive stance of volume one. Frame writes frequently that she believes her memory to have been affected by the electric shock treatments she received, and I think this helps - in part - to explain the difficulty of reading volume one. Volume one covers those years of her childhood, before the hospitals; she revives memories from her earliest years which she believes have been affected and disturbed by E.S.T.

The main reason, I would suggest for the 'difficulty' of Volume one, was that is was written from a defensive stance, of trying to prove that her background - her 'working-class' childhood, was capable of providing the roots for her writing - and not as her critics liked to focus on, her experiences of 'madness'. Volume one is in the style that it is because of her need to assert her own views and is a continuation of her battle against 'people - deciding for her'.

I like this statement which comes near the end of volume two:

... he [Frank Sargeson] and I planned my next "move" which according to Frank, was for me to 'travel overseas' to 'broaden my experience', a convenient way, both he and I realised, of saying that I was 'better out of New Zealand before someone decided I should be in a mental hospital.' We both knew that in a conformist society there are a surprising number of 'deciders' upon the lives and fate of others. Frank even suggested that he become my next of kin in a marriage of convenience which I then found insulting, and he, on overnight reflection, decided against.

Frank Sargeson was a recognized and established New Zealand writer and he literally took Janet Frame 'under his wing' when yet again she had no where to go. He is the person, who finally recognizes Frame's talent to write and on a practical level offers her a small cabin, in his garden, where she will have peace and time to work undisturbed and without the pressure to earn money. He also helps her to apply for social assistance and she receives 3 pounds a week, one of which she gives to Sargeson, as he also is struggling financially -his books are out of print.

Frank's offer to marry can only really be understood, when you know Frame's history, for example it was her mother who signed the agreement forms, after bullying by the authorities, for Frame's leucotomy (lobotomy) operation. I should explain that a literary award saves her from this "operation", and finally she is released from almost 8 years in and out of mental institutes.

The illness of her mother was the crisis which provoked Frame's return to the awful Seacliff institution. In my reading of 'Faces in the Water' and like most modern readers, I found it very difficult to understand why Frame spent so many years in mental hospitals. When you know some of the details of her family's poverty and that her first year of teaching is interrupted by a crisis - you start to understand the downward spiral of no work, no money, no accommodation.

Frame completed 3 years of teacher training plus taking extra courses of English and French literature at Dunedin University and then after a term of teaching in a primary school - she suffered a mental breakdown. On her release from Seacliff (3 years) she tried to find work as a teacher only to discover that the teaching college/university had listed her as "Failed". She worked in hotels, as a waitress and cleaner, as a live-in-carer, as a working boarder etc. And between jobs she stayed with her family at the cottage in Willowglen, Oamaru. Frame found it difficult to be there; the lack of space and the need to contribute income - only her father had work - made it difficult to live and work there.

Faced with the family anguish I made my usual escape, the route now perfected, and once again I was in Seacliff Hospital. I knew as soon as I arrived there that the days of practising that form of escape were over. I would go away somewhere, live on my own, earn enough money to live on, write my books; it was no use: I now had what was know as a 'history', and ways of dealing with those with a 'history' were stereotyped, without investigation. Very quickly, in my panic, I was removed to the back ward, the Brick Building where I became one of the forgotten people. When mother recovered her health, she and Bruddie and Dad would visit me for Christmas and my birthday and on one or two occasions during the year. It was recognized that I was now in hospital 'for life'. What I have described in Istina Mavet is my sense of hopelessness as the months passed, my fear of having to endure that constant state of physical capture where I was indeed at the mercy of those who made judgements and decisions without even talking at length to me or trying to know me or even submitting me to the standard tests which are available to psychiatrists.

Read that last sentence again - fellow Goodreaders. No one bothered to re-evalute over the course of 8, almost 9 years that initial diagnosis of schizophrenia. Not one medical person thought to re-evaluate that first diagnosis!

Volume Two covers the years from her arrival in Dunedin as a student, and progresses through her twenties, to the point where she is finally declared sane - the point at which she is awarded 'The Hubert Church Award' for her book 'The Lagoon and Other Stories', up to her stay with Frank Sargeson; to her 31st birthday when she boards a ship on her first voyage away from New Zealand.

Volume two is immensely readable - she recounts very little about her incarceration in the mental institutes and refers the reader to her novel 'Faces in the Water'. So most of this volume is about her struggles as a young person, wanting to make her living as a writer. She recounts those jobs, where she tries to work to support herself, and yet reserve some time for her writing - it's very, very difficult. It is only when she meets Sargeson, that she hears for the first time that writers need
- privacy, quiet and solitude - and of course the means to live - whilst they work at their writing.

'An Angel at My Table' is foremost a personal memoir of a writer's struggle to become a writer, but I think most importantly a valid documentation of New Zealand society - the conformist society - where space, support, encouragement, allowance, the permission to be different and to express individuality is heavily suppressed.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as part of my self-declared New Zealand November in 2015, and with great interest because this volume includes the time period where Janet Frame spends large portions of time in several mental institutions. She later turned this into a "novel," Faces in the Water, and this volume of her autobiography helped me understand how much of that book came from her actual experience.

"Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a 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."

One element of this story that was horrific to me was that of female hygiene, something that continues from the previous volume. In her teenage years, she was forced to use cloth, which would leak and bulge and smell. In her college and early adult years, she would take walks and dispose of her sanitary napkins in cemeteries, along slummy roads, or in the woods. And so did other girls. Why their mothers and other older women in their lives didn't normalize this for them is a huge mystery to me - so much monthly shame in an experience half the population would have been having! She also lived in incredible poverty during college and early teaching years, almost as if she didn't know it wasn't acceptable.

Another story that demonstrates this pre-feminism era is when the warden of the College sent for Janet to ask her to get her younger sister in line.

"Isabel, she said, was making a guy of herself both by her behavior and by the clothes she wore, in particular a skirt printed with a giraffe."

It turns out that "making a guy" of oneself includes standing out, both in speech and dress. And adding that applique giraffe to her skirt had put Isabel past the boundary of appropriate feminine behavior. Ha.

There is a lot in here about poets who were a heavy influence on her writing life, both in modeling writing but also in claiming a New Zealand identity in the writing, using the landscape, the unique experience, to create.

But more than anything, all of her life is lived between periods in mental institutions.

"The six weeks I spent at Seacliff hospital in a world I'd never known among people whose existences I never thought possible, became for me a concentrated course in the horrors of insanity and the dwelling-place of those judged insane, separating me for ever from the former acceptable realities and assurances of everyday life."

At one point she explains that Faces in the Water is entirely based on her actual experiences, but that she downplayed some of it to make it seem more realistic. Phew. At one point she is diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is almost a comfort to her - she has a name for it, she is in a group with other people, often creative, although she has to declare it along with job applications and every time she receives health care. Only the acclaimed publication of a book of her stories (The Lagoon: A Collection of Short Stories) saves her from a scheduled leucotomy (aka lobotomy). Mental note, boys and girls: evidence of creative output can save you from having a piece of your brain destroyed!

"It was now my writing that at last came to my rescue. It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life."

When Janet's sister dies, another sister to die while swimming because of a bad heart, she stays away from the funeral.

"I was in hiding. I was grieving. I didn't want anyone to 'see,' for since I had been in hospital, I had found that people didn't only 'see,' they searched carefully."

In fact any time there was a setback, problem, death, Janet is sheltered and protected in deference to (or fear of) her mental illness.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m amazed by how much Janet Frame packs into her books: most people with lives this eventful would have let the story sprawl to nearly 400 pages, but here in fewer than 200 she captures the years when she was roughly aged 18 to 31 – eight of which were spent off and on in mental hospitals. Frame travelled to Dunedin to live with her aunt and uncle (who was dying of cancer) while she attended teacher training college. A year later her younger sister Isabel joined her. A random incident that will stick with me from the book is when the sisters eat all the chocolates in the commemorative boxes their aunt keeps on display in the living room, thinking she’ll never find out. (She does.)

After her probationary teaching year, Frame walked out of the inspection appointment and never went back, asking for a doctor’s note for a few weeks off. The day before she was due to return, she resolved to commit suicide – the only way she could see to get out of teaching – and swallowed a whole packet of aspirins. She’s startlingly matter-of-fact about the whole thing. Of course, we know that she woke up the following day – vomiting and with a nosebleed and a headache, but no lasting damage. She gave up teaching to take psychology courses instead, and in an autobiographical assignment happened to mention her suicide attempt, which brought her to the attention of the head of department, who had her taken to the psych ward at Dunedin Hospital for six weeks. At this time she was given a (disputed) diagnosis of schizophrenia. Even after being declared ‘sane’ and returning to her parents’ for the summer, she continued her chats with Mr. Forrest the psychology professor.

Although she held a variety of housemaid and waitress jobs, taking journeys north and south to work in Christchurch and Dunedin, Frame was not well during this time. The mental hospital where she stayed is even worse than that depicted in Faces in the Water. Over the course of eight years, she had 200 rounds of ECT, and narrowly escaped a scheduled leucotomy when the doctor heard that she’d won a prize for her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories (though it had been published to poor reviews and was generally considered unoriginal and immature).

Both her mother and her sister Isabel die in the course of this book: her mother of a heart attack and her sister in a sickening repeat of their older sister Myrtle’s death 10 years later. Isabel had a heart problem and drowned at 21; Myrtle had drowned at 16.

All the while, she was gaining a new awareness of New Zealand’s literary landscape through anthologies and literary magazines, some of which she contributed to. Frank Sargeson, a fellow writer, offered her a place to work: an army hut where she began her debut novel. Getting a set of false teeth and having new author photos taken improved her confidence to no end, and she applied for and won a £300 grant to travel overseas. Even during the trip preparations she was exhibiting passivity, letting others decide her life for her: telling her what to pack and advising her to stay in Ibiza since it’s cheap. This second book ends with her taking leave of her family and setting sail for Southampton, England; her first novel, Owls Do Cry, is in press. It sets up a sense of anticipation for the third and final volume.

While this isn’t as sui generis as To the Is-land, it’s another excellent piece of life writing. Frame has quickly become one of my favorite writers.

[We have a forgetful professor to blame for her author name: “one of the lecturers at University had spoken to me using the name, Janet, when I had always been known as Jean; therefore I was now officially Janet.”]

Some favorite lines:

“I did not realize the extent of my loneliness. I clung to works of literature as a child clings to its mother.”

“Time confers privileges of arrangement and rearrangement undreamed of until it becomes Time Past.”

“If the world of the mad were the world where I now officially belonged (lifelong disease, no cure, no hope) then I would use it to survive, I would excel in it. I sensed that it did not exclude my being a poet.”

“I had a sense of being borne along on the wishes of others, but that was not unusual in my life.”

“I dreaded the polishing process that is a result of the natural friction within families.”

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second volume in Janet Frame’s life covers the particularly difficult period from when she left home at 17 or 18 until she left NZ at 31. The isolation she described in the first volume doesn’t become overpowering until she is in her aunt’s tiny house where she is boarding

then gradually the excitement gave way to anxiety. So this was how it was, face to face with the Future—being alone, having no one to talk to, being afraid of the city and Training College and teaching, and having to pretend that I was not alone, that I had many people to talk to, that I felt at home in Dunedin, and that teaching was what I had longed to do all my life.

She is desperate to please and shy to a crippling degree: it’s almost too excruciating to read about but at the same time I can totally relate. But she lightens her story with humour against herself in many places. I loved the description of her visits home:

I was dazzled by the new language and its powerful vocabulary. I could now say to members of my family, ‘That’s rationalisation, that’s sublimation, you’re really frustrated sexually, your super-ego tells you that but your id disagrees.’
Mother blushed when I said the word ‘sexually.’ Dad frowned, and said nothing except, ‘So that’s what you learn at University and Training College.’
I explained to my sisters the significance of their dreams, how ‘everything was phallic.’ I also talked with exaggerated wisdom of T. S. Eliot and The Golden Bough and ‘The Waste Land.’ ‘I love teaching,’ I said

What’s particularly sad, she said, is that she didn’t know that so many “in timidity and shyness and ignorance, lived as bizarre a life as I”.

Although I've read elsewhere that she hated teaching, that’s not how Frame relates it – she says she loved teaching the Standard Twos at Arthur Street (my old school!); it was the interaction with other teachers she couldn’t face, and more importantly, the evaluation at the end of her probationary year. She walked out of that, thinking that suicide was her only option. She didn’t succeed but her breakdown was sensed by two of her University teachers (she was taking Psychology and English part time) who took her to hospital.

That is where her life really broke down; she was never told that, after a few weeks’ rest, refusing to be released into her mother’s care meant that she would be involuntarily committed. Worse, her obviously inappropriate diagnosis (even for 1945) of schizophrenia - based on no tests or contact with a psychiatrist – became a label that determined the next ten years of her life.

She was released “on probation” and took odd jobs that didn’t really allow her time to write; and in a sense the label became self-fulfilling as she attempted to live up to what she thought a schizophrenic was. (She had been told, in sessions with her psych teacher, “When I think of you, I think of van Gogh, of Hugo Wolf” and internalized that madness equalled artistic ability).
But without any support or counselling, she couldn’t face the outside for long. Initially the institutional spells were measured in months, but in the end she was locked away for 8 years. Eight. Years.
During those times she had multiple shock treatments and very near the end was spared a lobotomy only because a doctor noticed that her first book (The Lagoon And Other Stories) had won a prize.

It is horrific, absolutely chilling stuff, and her candid portrayal of the abysmal level of mental health “care” is shameful even by the standards of the time. But she doesn’t write much about that whole period because she says it became the basis of her novel Faces in the Water; though now, she says (writing in 1982) she would not have toned down the cruelty nor left so much out for fear of seeming too hysterical.

So the book prize eventually secured her release. Her life was saved, essentially, when she met the writer Frank Sargeson in Auckland, who gave her a place and the space to write – the only freedom she had ever wanted. But recognizing that her label would never leave her in NZ (she was treated either warily as “from the loony bin”, or protectively as a frail child to be sheltered), he encouraged her to apply for a grant to study and write overseas.

And there she ends her 2nd volume. This is not a joyful book: it is harrowing to read of so much suffering and cruelty, but her resilience, insight and dedication to writing is an absolute joy to read about. And I think it is incredibly brave to appear so vulnerable in front of the whole world.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a great review here, but I have a headache.

Finished Vol. 2 of Frame's Autobiography; read To the Is-Land in January. Vol. 2 expands on the the things I found most interesting in Vol. 1. I liked her rebuttal to the prevailing impression that she was mentally ill: that what she suffered from was a paralyzing personal shyness, shame, and fear about how to fit into the sectors of society (university, literary New Zealand) that could facilitate her writing life, and that this paralysis developed not from madness (Frame was diagnosed as schizophrenic, nearly was lobotomized, and then was found to have been misdiagnosed), but from upward mobility. The two volumes of the Autobiography that I've read so far explore this very nicely, elaborating on and critiquing the ideas in A Room of One's Own. (When Frame was finally invited to stay for free in a little writing hut in a garden, with a cot, a typewriter, and vegetarian lunches, I was delighted with her good fortune, because I know only too well how precious that Room is).

I liked Frame's flat statement that reading great books should always, always be a liberating experience for other writers ("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."), paired with her admission that there is nothing more infuriating (and debilitating!) than acquaintance with a writer who has a trust fund. But even more than that, I appreciated Frame's insistence that no matter how hard one's personal circumstances may make writing, for being poor or mentally ill or morbidly insecure or working insane hours make writing very hard indeed, in order to be a writer, one must continue writing, and that the few moments one snatches to put down words are a privilege that many are denied.

[Glen U · Rating 3 out of 5]

"An Angel At My Table" is Janet Frame's second part of her three piece autobiography. Covering Frames life from her adolescent years until her early thirties, Frame describes the processes that formed her as a writer, the experiences that became the autobiographical "fiction" of her first published novels, and the reasons for her subsequent relocation to the European continent. Like the first piece of her autobiography, "To The Is-Land", Frame writes in a more straight forward style, relying more on conventional prose, rather than the beautiful prose poetry of her fiction pieces. In my opinion, the first third of the book was excellent. The remainder of the book, while good, seemed to be less personal, and did not emotionally involve me, as the first part of the book did. I think that Frame wrenched out so much emotion in the fictional accounts of those years in mental disarray, that to describe them again, as fact, was just too much of a chore. I will read part three of the autobiography, but I must admit, I prefer the lovely and emotional writings of her fiction to her non-fiction.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up in a charity shop, after reading the synopsis I knew immediately that I would love the book.
Indeed I did!
Although this book features a lot of hardship, it is not full of self pity. The terrible treatment Janet Frame experiences are portrayed as a more factual overview.
The rest is a rich tapestry of her life, her writings, her play, her travels, her friends, acquaintances and lovers.
The best part of this book for me is the depths Frame allows you to dive into her mind and her wonderful imagination.
Some of her thoughts I can really relate to some of her traits, especially the isolation shyness can bring.
Janet Frame, through thick and thin and relentless bullying, stuck by her guns and WROTE!

[Inger Kitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not really into autobiographies, but this was just something out of ordinary. In fact, I liked it so much that I decided to write my first review ever. The story is about young woman, who is diagnosed with schizophrenia and spends 8 years of her life in different hospitals without actually being "sick". She experiences great loss in her life which makes her soul poetic, opinions honest and outlook on life refreshing.

Your next book should be this one.

[Sam Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally found a copy in the ballieu. This has such a strong hold to the mainland it feels good to read and connect with. It is a New Zealand that only exists in our myth of the place now I think. Hard to imagine a sense of takapuna or the mount as she described it, even more generally the uncertainty that came from restricted access to knowledge

Equally interesting, to me, as a social insight into NZ as it is a personal history of Janet Frame.

[Fridhaaaaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

How precious was this book to me when I was a kid? At least like Jane's mouth described in The Catcher in the rye, this book took me somewhere I belonged, and as much as I was nowhere in the book, I kept recognizing myself.

[Frances Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite books of the year... Introduced me to an author I hope will feature in my life again and again. Not bad for a book I picked up on the street.

[lucky little cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

19 hrs, 175 wpm

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second volume of Frame's autobiography, An Angel at My Table covers her life at university and her subsequent hospitalisation, for the better part of a decade, for schizophrenia. I should say suspected schizophrenia, for she never actually had it. In some ways for me this autobiography suffers a little for skating over what Frame went through in Seacliff mental hospital. I don't mean that I particularly want to read misery porn, but Frame herself mentions here that she'd already written extensively about this time of her life in her book Faces in the Water (which I haven't read but now want to). It's understandable that she doesn't want to have to cover the same ground twice, or in the same way, but her misdiagnosis and hospital stay is the central event of this volume of her autobiography, with reverberations from it spreading through the whole of her life. I can't help but think that the relief that Frank Sargeson gave her by providing a safe place to work and recover and write would have stood out all the more in the text if the worst parts of Frame's twenties hadn't been glossed over so much.

[Eric Hinkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

"My life so far had trained me to perform, to gain approval by answering questions in examinations, solving problems, exhibiting flashes of 'cleverness' and 'difference.' I was usually ashamed of my clothing. I was baffled by my fuzzy hair and the attention it drew, and the urgency with which people advised me that I have it 'straightened', as if it posed a threat. I was not fluent in conversation, nor witty, nor brilliant. I was an ordinary grey-feathered bird that spent its life flashing one or two crimson feathers at the world, adapting the feathers to suit the time in life. In my childhood I had displayed number riddles, memorising long passages of verse and prose, mathematical answers; now, to suit the occasion, I wore my schizophrenic fancy dress."

"The music reached down like a long spoon inside me and stirred and stirred."

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had this on my watchlist for years.... haven't read the first book (this is number 2 of 3) but it really didn't matter. It follows Janet's memories of her young to middle adult life. An interesting life, an interesting read. Reading number 1 might perhaps answer s few questions for me about why she is so anxious and so lacking in self worth... Book 3 I'm guessing, gets into her life after she hasmade her writing breakthroughs. I'm keen to read either!

[Ryan Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt, the greatest autobiography i've ever read. Heartbreakingly honest, Janet Frame tells her story of growing up in New Zealand, a fractured and poor family overun with siblings. The intelligent outsider at school, poet, bookworm, who's eventual rise to teaching is marred by her battle with mental health.
Absolutley engaging, frightfully honest, and a beautiful account of the fragility of the mental state.

[Maciej Lewandowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Anioł przy moim stole” to smutna, pełna bólu i samotności, autobiografia znanej poetki i powieściopisarki, ukazująca życie wrażliwej, wyalienowanej młodej kobiety w Nowej Zelandii w latach czterdziestych i pięćdziesiątych ubiegłego wieku.

Więcej na blogu Poczytane.pl: http://poczytane.pl/aniol-przy-moim-s...

[Thais Mather · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite autobiography of all time. Beautiful prose, a deep understanding of female punishment, and a fierce and passionate voice. I could read the text over and over again. I have read it three times and always discover something new. A very important text on the female experience.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't realize this was the middle of her autobiography series of 3 volumes. It made me want to read the 1st and 3rd volumes. Also to read some of her prose as well.

[Saskia Heezen · Rating 2 out of 5]

de eerste 50 bladzijdes gelezen en kan er niet inkomen.

[Päivi Metsäniemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olen ollut kiinnostunut Janet Framesta siitä lähtien, kun tutustuin häneen Riitta Jalosen haastatteluissa ja Kirkkaus-romaanissa. Nyt muistin hänet taas, kun Jalonen kirjoittaa Framesta Suurteoksia 2 -kirjassa. Todella omalaatuisen elämän elänyt Janet Frame on Uuden Seelannin isoja kirjailijoita, ja hänen kolmiosainen elämäkertansa on mielenkiintoinen näkökulma viime vuosisataan maan historiassa ja tietenkin myös uskomattoman elämäntarinan valottaja.

Elämäkertatrilogiaa ei ole suomennettu, ja ensimmäiseksi sain käsiini tämän kakkososan alkukielellä. Kirja sijoittuu Framen opiskelu- ja nuoriin aikuisuusvuosiin, läpimurtoon kirjailijana, mutta ennen kaikkea pitkiin vuosiin mielisairaalassa, jossa hänet leimattiin skitsofreniaa sairastavaksi ilman oikeastaan mitään kunnon syytä - mutta tällaista länsimainen psykiatria tuohon aikaan olikin. Lobotomialta hän pelastui yhden skarpin lääkärin ansiosta - tämä psykiatri oli lukenut Framen tuotantoa ja tulkinnut, että skitsofreniaa sairastava ei olisi tällasita voinut kirjoittaa.

Kirjan tyyli on kiinnostavan lakoninen ja toteava. Tunteissa ei vellota, asiat - sekä hyvät että kammottavan hirveät - vain tapahtuvat. Uuden Seelannin kulttuurissa on jotain syvästi häiritsevää; täysi länsimaa mutta supereksoottinen ilmasto ja luonto, ja jossa kolonialismin perintöä ei vielä näinä vuosikymmeninä ole käsitelty ollenkaan.

Luin samaan aikaan Hannah Gadsbyn Nanette -elämäkertaa, ja kummallisesti nämä kaksi kirjaa muodostavat täydellisen parin. Frame Uudessa Seelannissa ja Gadsby Tasmaniassa etsivät omaa polkuaan naisneroina, väärin ymmärrettyinä ja oman elämänsä sivuhenkilöinä tai vielä pahempaankin, hyljeksittyinä ja ei-toivottuina. Molemmilla järkyttävää traumahistoriaa, ja self made womanina tehty luova ura.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've usually found autobiographies quite dry - they tend to feel like a series of dry facts with occasional insights, and I've only thought of them as worth reading if you truly want to learn more about someone's life. This autobiography changed my mind and proved to me that they can truly be literary enterprises. Frame's prose is absolutely breathtaking, the pacing and structure was engaging, and the insights she offers about her experiences and about writing were often incredibly profound, astute, and beautiful. It touched me on a personal level as I really connected with young Janet's painfully shy and lonely ways. I also think this book is a must-read alongside the semiautobiographical (or simply fictional, as I believe she would have called it) Faces in the Water. While I really liked that work, the main issue I had with it was that it didn't really seem to offer any larger insights other than general observations on the dehumanizing and cruel conditions of the institution - to me, it primarily read as a description (a beautiful and moving description, but a description nonetheless) rather than a story or novel. Ironically, I got a lot more of that story aspect with the autobiography. Granted, it didn't wrap it up in a satisfying way, but given that it is one volume of a three volume autobiography (and that "wrapping up" one period of her life would be a bit contrived), it's understandable. Frame seemed like such an immensely intelligent, thoughtful, and talented person and reading her re-construction of this period of her life really felt like a privileged insight.

[Susan Wilson]

It’s been years since I last read AAAMT or watched the film but it’s still harrowing. It particularly struck me this time how open and vulnerable she is to let the reader into her thoughts on things as “embarrassing” in her time (and even now to an extent) as the disposal of used sanitary products. She was truly remarkable.

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frame really is such a beautiful writer, and so vulnerable in her narrative. To go through even a teaspoon of what she has, and to carry on living and writing… she is so brave and resilient. Her writing is beautiful, the narrative engaging.
One of my favourite, if not THE favourite of the autobiographies I’ve read.

I want to rush into the next book, but also want to savour what I’ve just read.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book meant such a lot to me, especially since the fact that she was committed suicide and was sent to a mental hospital due to the fact that she was too shy and reluctant to talk to people. Which really made me quite worried.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

In An Angel At My Table, Janet Frame talks about the important role that literature plays in her life. Time and time again, she clings to her books to survive both uncomfortable and terrible situations. A bit slow for me.

[Kate Callahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed this one more than the first one! I really felt myself feeling sympathetic towards Janet and everything she went through. And I’m so excited to, now that I know her backstory, go on to read more of her work!

[Foreign]

UK: Trade paperback original