R.I.P. Janet Frame, 79

New Zealand Writer Who Explored Madness Dies: “Ms. Frame created romantic visionaries — eccentrics, mad people, epileptics — and pitted them against the repressive forces of a sterile, conformist society. Or maybe she was just reporting on her life. A continuing discussion among critics was whether her autobiographical work was mostly fiction or whether her fiction was mostly autobiographical.” Suffering a nervous breakdown and making a suicide attempt, she was institutionalized, underwent numerous ECT (electroshock) treatments, and was on the point of receiving a lobotomy when consultants said her diagnosis of schizophrenia had been a mistake. Frame lamented, “Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?” A panel of psychiatrists later ruled that the exquisitely shy writer was, in the terms of this New York Times obituary, “not mentally ill, just different from other people”. Her autobiography, in many ways perhaps more comfortable for her readers than her fiction, was adapted into Jane Campion’s 1990 film, An Angel at My Table. She has often been discussed as a candidate for the Nobel literature prize. She succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia, with which she had been diagnosed on her birthday last August.

“”For your own good” is a persuasive argument

that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.”

— Janet Frame, Faces In The Water (1982)

This fascinating article by Tara Hawes from the University of Otago, NZ, explores Frame’s torment about who she was (or wasn’t), her obsession with the autobiographical ‘I’ and the process Hawes calls ‘selfing the other and othering the self’ throughout Frame’s oeuvre.