Out of the frame

As part of her Janet Frame Memorial Lecture on the state of literature in New Zealand, CHARLOTTE GRIMSHAW dwelt on a personal battle for authenticity, excerpted here.

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This is the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture and here is a memory of Janet Frame. I remember visiting her house in a small town, where we discovered Janet was dealing with her hypersensitivity to noise by barricading herself in, lining the internal walls.

Janet said to me, “You’re the one who used to think ‘Kathramansfield’ was all one word.” I was a teenager, and already I was thinking about translating the experience into fiction. I wanted to write about this strange, shy, charming Janet, the writer in the small, barricaded house in the silent street.

As we all know, Frame’s story involves what used to be called, colloquially, “madness”. And since this lecture pays tribute to her, it seems relevant to describe how, in this very building, in the Turnbull archive, my father CK Stead has lodged statements in which he asserts that I wrote my last book while suffering from “delusion” and “mental aberration”, which sounds to me a lot like “madness”.

This is a personal turn, but I’ll tell you why I think it’s relevant. In February, I was confronted with the kind of question the universe likes to throw at writers: how was I going to deliver the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture in the very building where I’d just found statements accusing me of delusion – and not mention the statements?

The universe answered the question: I had to mention them.

I began to write fiction as a child, and so very early on I was considering the process of fictionalising. If you were inventing a story about me, you might play with the idea that as the daughter of a fiction writer who used details of our lives in his stories, I became an unreliable narrator.

This would be fiction. In fact, every time I wrote, I was examining how to put reality through the fictional filter. This involved a continual evaluation. If I constantly had my eye on the border between fact and fiction, I knew it existed, and where it was.