Cette série autobiographique explore les années de formation de l'auteure en Nouvelle-Zélande, dépeignant une enfance et une adolescence au sein d'une famille matériellement pauvre mais intellectuellement intense. Elle détaille avec vivacité ses premières rencontres avec l'amour, la mort et le monde des mots, en particulier la poésie. Les récits capturent de profondes expériences intérieures et la formation d'une âme artistique dans un environnement unique.
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
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.'
New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually followed by her entry into the saving world of writers and the "Mirror City" that sustains them, we are given not only a record of the events of a life, but also "the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors." Frame's journey of self-discovery, from New Zealand to London, to Paris and Barcelona, and then home again, is a heartfelt and courageous account of a writer's beginnings as well as one woman's personal struggle to survive.
New Zealand's preeminent writer brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections.