Book Review: "An Angel at My Table" by Janet Frame

This book, bought on the cheap, was perhaps one of the most moving and heartbreaking reads I have read this year. An Angel at My Table features an introduction by the director of the incredible movie Bright Star, Jane Campion and is written in a beautiful, almost overtly atmospheric style. I was pretty sure from the moment that I saw this book that I wanted to read it but I had no idea how it would destroy my soul. It quite literally took me away and honestly, I never knew about some of these experiences. It is one of the best books I have read this year and if I can recommend any book to you it is most likely going to be this one.

Janet Frame's family is poor but it doesn't stop her childhood in 1920s-30s New Zealand being filled with love and care. Be that as it may, our author is insanely shy and yet, a very observant girl with a genuinely incredible imagination - something that is often lacking around the children of today. She is shaped by a home filled with books, eccentric family members, sibling bonds, and the constant instability brought by her father’s work and poverty. From the start, she frames her imagination and language as protective homes that shield her from a chaotic world. I was practically won over by the time she started discussing how important imagination was to her because I mean, the book speaks for itself as a great creation from that imagination.

The author is marked by her losses as well as her imagination. Her sister, Myrtle drowns and dies whilst her sister Isabel dies of a heart defect. Losing people this close to you from these things can be difficult but for the little girl who can barely make sense of herself, it can be deeply traumatic, making her retreat into her imagination even further. She describes the tragedies quietly, as if whispering to the reader - there's a restraint in which she is almost not willing to tell us about it anymore. It's like having a heart-to-heart conversation with her. It's this trauma that I believe feeds into how people, usually psychologists, misunderstood her and her condition throughout her life.

One thing I was glad about is that for a short time, her intelligence is recognised when she goes to school. But her social anxiety means that she is often away from others - she again disappears into these mental worlds of imagination. Her literary talent does nothing to get her more involved with peers and even though her written fluency is great, her verbal coherence becomes a problem when trying to express herself. I'm not going to lie, I really related to this part. Talking to me will make you believe that you are talking to someone who barely knows how to speak and yet, my writing on here is fairly coherent (I hope you're enjoying it so far).

When she ends up at teachers' college, she is depressed and 'other'. She feels this intense pressure to conform to social norms and yet, she can never seem to manage it. This honestly really struck a chord with me. I never really felt like I fit in too, even though I was around people like myself. Everyone just seemed so temporary and I definitely felt like I was being used for the fact I read a lot by those who perhaps did not. But much worse than me, Janet Frame's outsider mentality and her mental health issues culminate in her trying to end her own life. I felt so bad for her because she is definitely trying her best in a world that is constantly trying to make her feel like the 'other'. I'm basically saying that I understand where she's coming from and it breaks my heart.

Our author is incorrectly diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined for years in mental hospitals, undergoing hundreds of electroconvulsive treatments. It's a tragedy that is constantly being reflected in our mental health services today where young women are forever thrown into a therapy system without having their actual health checked. A recent case I can recall is one pre-teen that actually took her own life after being thrown into the mental health system and it turns out she had something actually physically wrong with her or something. But it is so sad when this happens and it almost exclusively happens to young women. Janet Frame's descriptions of institutional life such as: wards, treatments, humiliation and helplessness, are painfully vivid and in many of these memories there are moments of abuse.

Her rescue from a scheduled lobotomy occurs only because she wins a prestigious literary award for her first book, convincing doctors she may not be schizophrenic. Imagine being scheduled for a lobotomy and then being saved at the last minute - even the doctors can't be convinced by running a few more tests, they have to be convinced by a literal rescue. I mean, we can see that from this, the mental health systems today have not come a long way and are still just as humiliating and abusive towards its clients where everyone is just a tick-box and nobody is really a human being. If that was not the case, the suicide rate would be going down instead of up. But nobody is ready for that conversation. The amount of institutional authority here is unreal though - they don't even trust the fact that maybe some more, non-invasive tests need to be done. They only trust another outlet of authority: a literary prize.

Once she breaks free of the mental health system and their abuses, she begins to tour and she writes so much more than before. Her writing is of course, shaped by trauma and guilt, her experiences weigh in on to her writing and it challenges the norms when it comes to psychiatric help and the role art can play in mental health. This book not only teaches us about the author, but exposes the failures of a system still failing across the world, a system that still doesn't see its patients as people and until that happens - I regretfully think that we are going to see many more cases like Frame's. It is impossible to tell but there are still huge holes in the broken mental health system.