An Angel at My Table

Janet Frame

3 ideas

1. Lobotomy cancelled by a literary prize

   After years in New Zealand psychiatric hospitals, including Seacliff, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and given about two hundred unmodified electroconvulsive treatments, Janet Frame was scheduled for a leucotomy. Her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, won the Hubert Church Memorial Award in 1952. The hospital superintendent read of the prize in the newspaper and cancelled the operation, telling her she should stay as she was. Brain surgery was stopped not by a clinical reassessment but by public recognition from outside the hospital.

2. A diagnosis becomes a role you perform

   Once labelled schizophrenic, Frame read the textbook descriptions and half-adopted them, because the diagnosis gave a shy, poor, isolated young woman a recognised identity and a kind of distinction. The label then worked in a loop: clinicians read her behaviour through the diagnosis, and her behaviour drifted toward what the diagnosis predicted. A psychiatric label can create the evidence that seems to confirm it.

3. Sargeson's hut as room to write

   After her release, the writer Frank Sargeson gave Frame a hut on his property in Takapuna, along with a small income arrangement and a daily routine. That shelter, time and his treating her as a working writer helped make it possible for her to complete her first novel, Owls Do Cry, though the arrangement was not always easy between them.

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