Janet Frame Critical Essay | Critical Review by Carolyn Bliss

SOURCE: A review of An Autobiography, in World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 408-09.

Bliss is an American writer and critic. In the review below, she considers Frame's An Autobiography "an illuminating tour" of the author's upbringing in New Zealand.

Contemporary theorists of the autobiography are fairly well agreed that the genre's interest and worth lie less in the "facts" it provides about a historically verifiable life than in the nature of the invented self which the autobiographical text constructs and enacts. The New Zealand writer Janet Frame would probably endorse this critical posture, having adopted it as a compositional strategy for her own autobiography. On the book's opening page she alerts us that the "mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths" contained therein tends always toward a state of being for which "the starting point is myth." Very deliberately, then, her text searches...
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