Questa serie autobiografica approfondisce gli anni formativi dell'autrice in Nuova Zelanda, ritraendo un'infanzia e un'adolescenza all'interno di una famiglia materialmente povera ma intellettualmente intensa. Dettaglia vividamente i suoi primi incontri con l'amore, la morte e il mondo delle parole, in particolare la poesia. Le narrazioni catturano profonde esperienze interiori e la formazione di un'anima artistica in un ambiente unico.
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.'