Houses rock 'like a sea', blame rests on individuals 'like a butterfly on a leaf'. Analogies are laden on to analogies, developing into riots of hyper-meaning. Yet personal allusions are rendered obscure in Frame's fiction by an intensely metaphorical style. Frame's world beyond this world, her moment of creative rapture, appears to be a point of trance-like introspection. And I do invent things'.įrame's definition of autobiography as 'fact', versus fiction as 'invented', is a definition King respects, yet it does not hold the reader. However, she later suggested that her autobiography, An Angel at my Table, was partly written to convince everyone that, after all 'my fiction is genuine fiction. The first work she referred to explicitly as a novel, The Edge of the Alphabet, was, King writes, 'based on the troubled experience of Geordie'. What I do see is life within.' Faces in the Water she described as 'simply an almost truthful account of a few past experiences'. Frame, while avowing the fictiveness of her accounts of lunacy, also presented her concerns as inward-turning: 'I'm not sure that I see life at all. Just how specifically Frame alludes to family disasters in her disaster-strewn fiction is never resolved in King's elegantly written, densely researched and remorselessly long biography. These events, King suggests, precipitated Frame's mental collapse, and formed much of the matter of her work, in transmuted form.

Geordie became an epileptic and, eventually, a wife-smashing alcoholic Myrtle and Laura died in strange swimming accidents. With brother Geordie - doomed by their Brontë myth to Branwellesque decline - they muddied their faces and blotted the neighbourhood with shrieked obscenities. They grew up in cramped rooms in Dunedin their father a train driver, their mother a housewife and poet. The Frame sisters - Janet, June, Myrtle and Laura - felt themselves to be like the Brontës - because they held, by right, 'silk purses' of words, and because their family was an anvil on which disasters fell. Her novels, which include Owls do Cry (1957), Faces in the Water (1961) Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) and Intensive Care (1970), are relentless sagas of distress. Born in New Zealand in 1924, to a family fallen from relative prosperity to ramshackle impecuniousness, she spent her twenties in mental asylums in New Zealand and London, diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Owls do cry by janet frame