Wrestling With the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame

Janet Frame, born in 1924, is New Zealand's most celebrated and least public author. She has published more than twenty books and has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. Her three-volume memoir, described by Michael Holroyd as "one of the greatest autobiographies written this century," was the subject of the award-winning film An Angel at My Table.

Relying on documents never previously released, including Janet Frame's diaries, health records, and court transcripts, Michael King reveals the formative episodes of her life-the poverty of her childhood, her enduring sense of being an outsider, the deaths of two sisters by drowning, her incarceration in psychiatric hospitals for the better part of a decade, and her continuing struggle against diagnoses of mental illness. And he deals in frank detail with her life in the decades since her memoirs were published.

Insightful, shocking, and unforgettable, Wrestling with the Angel is a remarkable account of a writer who has been pushed to the limit by life and, with equal force, has pushed the powers of her imagination and talent to create extraordinary work.