Mental Health Bookclub discussion

For August Marina has kindly suggested the theme of books written by authors who have personal experience of MH. The book she has suggested is:


-'Angel at my Table' by Janet Frame.

For our light-read choice I've gone for:



-'Love May Fail' by Matthew Quick, (also author of the excellent 'The Silver Linings Playbook') who writes with both humour and insight into the human condition.

As always, read as much (or as little) as you like, use what's useful to you, drop what's not, feel free to have discussions... and enjoy x

I am moving house and have accidentally put my copy of An Angel at My Table in one of the boxes... grrr... I hope I will be able to find, though :-)

How annoying! It's ok, there's no pressure! ;) x

I managed to find it the other day and I hope I'll be able to start it soon. Are you already reading it?

I haven't started it yet, but I'm gonna be ordering 'love fails' soon.

I'm reading An Angel at my Table but I can't say I'm much impressed yet. I have finished the first book, To the Is-Land, and have just started the second one, the actual An Angel at My Table. This should be the one where she recounts her experience as a mental patient. As far as I've understood, at least.

In the first one Frame just recounts her childhood, which is quite interesting but not deeply so. She came from a very poor family in pre-WWII New Zealand, lost a sister to drowning, had an epileptic brother, had to milk her cows. Well. That's interesting, yes, but not really what I wanted to read. She also tells about her love of poetry and how she wanted to be a poet even as a young child. She tells about her reads, and so on. Interesting to understand how she came to be the writer Janet Frame. But I was more interested in the person Janet Frame.

Let's see how it goes on, though.

I'm now reading the second book in the autobiography, the actual An Angel at My Table. It's a very slow read because I'm not enjoying it so much, so I have to read something else at the same time.

The story of how Frame ended up in Seacliff, the local mental hospital, is quite creepy. She attempted suicide with aspirin and ended up just vomiting a lot. She was so silly as to write about it in an essay for University, that's why she ended up in the local psych ward. In the end she was sent to Seacliff because she refused to go home with her mother. It's absolutely crazy, but hey, this was the Fourties, and I'm pretty sure it would have been much the same all over the world. Maybe it would have been even worse here in Italy, what with Mussolini and all.

What I don't get is how she takes her schizophrenia diagnosis for granted and starts reading all she can about it. I mean, it's pretty normal to want to know what's going on in your head and read everything you can on your supposed illness. But I don't understand how she keeps feigning her illness. She reads a lot about schizophrenia and, despite being sure she doesn't have it (and she doesn't, as far as she tells she's never been out of touch with reality), she keeps pretending she has all of the symptoms she's read about. That's how, in a rural society 70 years ago, she ends up being committed to Seacliff "for life" (although it will "only" be 8 years in the end). I don't understand. Of course, the first thing I don't understand is how it is possible that none of the doctors actually visited her for more than 10 minutes at a time and how they didn't realize she didn't have schizophrenia. But this is the Fourties, right? What really surpasses my comprehension is how a perfectly sane, if probably depressed, woman in her mid twenties might keep pretending she has symptoms she has never had. Maybe because, as she tells earlier, she feels like you have to have something "interesting", a "story" to be a writer? But it gets her more than 200 ECTs and ready for leucotomy! I can't get it. Why didn't she stop pretending after a while?

I'll go on reading, but I don't feel much sympathy for Frame, I'm afraid.