Janet’s grace

“To whatever extent the intellectual, emotional, and artistic struggles of Janet Frame’s protagonist [in Towards Another Summer] mirror those of its author, a wrenching portrait of both emerges, fascinating especially in its exploration of nostalgia as well as in its cross-genre experimentation with the novel as memoir,” writes Robert Braile in a Boston Globe review. “Written in 1963, Frame refused to have Towards Another Summer published in her lifetime, considering it too revealing. The author skillfully depicts the psychological intricacies of nostalgia, using various narrative techniques to express the conflict between a desired past and an undesired present at the heart of this emotion. She is so artful in doing so that it lends credence to the autobiographical nature of the novel, especially as Frame also suffered emotional difficulties, also went on a similar weekend trip in the early 1960s, and also was from New Zealand but lived in London. She even physically resembled Grace.”