Janet Frame is New Zealand's most celebrated author who has published more than twenty books and has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. Her three-volume memoir, was the subject of the award-winning film An Angel at My Table. Working from previously un-released documents including Janet Frame's diaries, health records, and court transcripts, Michael King reveals the formative episodes of her life - the poverty of her childhood, 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.