See Virago Classics about Janet Frame Introduced by Hillary Mantel
Title “Faces in the Water”

"The years following childhood become welded to their future"
By sally tarbox on 8 June 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
Second volume of Janet Frame's autobiography, opening where the previous one ended, with her journey to teacher training college. She recalls her awkwardness, the struggle to mix, her self-effacing behaviour with the relatives she boards with..but also her love for literature and continuing submissions of her work to magazines.
But her family life remains hard; money remains tight, there are sibling tensions, her brother's ongoing epilepsy, a forced relocation.
And then, suddenly, the author seems to have some sort of breakdown - this isn't really explained, although she writes that she's covered the subject more thoroughly in other works. And in the 1950s, that didn't mean a course of anti-depressants, but incarceration in an asylum, ECT treatments and being put on the list for a lobotomy to cure her 'schizophrenia.'
The author thankfully avoids the last and cautiously takes up life again in a succession of menial jobs until fellow writer Frank Sargerson offers her sanctuary and a place to pursue her writing. As the volume closes, she is just off on her first trip to Europe...

This is accomplished, thought-provoking writing:
"Writing an autobiography, 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 characters all the events, thoughts, feelings, and there is a mass of time, now a sticky mess, now a jewel bigger than the planets and the stars." ( )

I first heard of New Zealand author Janet Frame several years ago when I read that she had been living in a mental hospital and about to be lobotomized, when a doctor recognized her name as the recipient of a writer's award, and took her off the list for the procedure. I read at least one of her novels, but don't quite remember what it was about. The autobiography is very memorable and enjoyable.
It is actually 3 volumes: To the Is-land, An Angel at my Table and Envoy from the Mirror City. She is wonderful at telling the story of her family: her parents come alive, her brother and sisters (2 of which, in an odd coincidence and at different times, drowned) are lovingly portrayed sparing none of their faults, but without rancor or judgement. Her own dive into mental illness was first noted when she left her classroom (she went to teacher's college) during the end of the year observation of her teaching and never returned. She then proceeded to take an overdose of aspirin but survived and then visits her former English teacher and tells him what she had done as if it were all very normal. This begins years of living in a mental asylum and being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Despite what should have been a miserable story on the face of it, she presents a life that was hopeful in some sense. All the tragic aspects of her family and her illness come across as surprising and slightly separate from herself as if she was standing outside of herself. Not knowing anything about New Zealand writers, it was interesting to read about some of the writers she became acquainted with. ( )

Autobiografisch drieluik: Naar het Is-land/Een engel aan mijn tafel/De gezant van Spiegelstad. Verslag van haar jeugd, haar studententijd, haar vereenzaming die uiteindelijk tot de fatale diagnose leidt, en haar jarenlange strijd om erkenning nadat zij geestelijk gezond is verklaard.

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.

( )