From poverty, psychiatric hospital and writing in a shed to literary stardom: Janet Frame at 100 | Autobiography and memoir | The Guardian

In February 1975 the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was the subject of a rare interview for television conducted by the journalist Michael Noonan. This relaxed, intimate retrospective of her life and work - Frame and Noonan stroll, laughing together, at the height of summer along a sea-swept beach near her then home on the Whangaparāoa Peninsula, north of Auckland - was made as part of a project to mark the United Nations' International Women's Year. Frame would turn 51 that August; on screen she comes across as confident, relaxed, witty and thoughtful, far removed from the introverted and reclusive former psychiatric patient portrayed in Jane Campion's 1990 film An Angel at My Table. Based on Frame's bestselling autobiography, it is a legend-enforcing depiction of how Frame transformed her early background of poverty, tragedy and mental illness into literature. The New York Times obituary published the day after her death from leukaemia on 29 January 2004 would categorise Frame in its headline as a "writer who explored madness".