I’ve been trying to teach Janet Frame’s work for the first time these past weeks, working with the elegant new edition of The Edge of the Alphabet from Fitzcarraldo. One pleasure when introducing a work just this good is that, no matter how bad or boring your own teaching might be, or how much you might get wrong, no one’s time will be wasted. The chance is there to read Frame in all her beauty and brilliance!

And that beauty and brilliance led me back, after twenty-five years away, to the Autobiography. This, from An Angel at My Table, captures the experience of reading its author:

“There is a freedom born from the acknowledgement of greatness in literature, as if one gave away what one desired to keep, and in giving, there is a new space cleared for growth, an onrush of a new season beneath a secret sun. Acknowledging any great work of art is like beingin love; one walks on air; any decline, destruction, death are within, not in the beloved; it is a falling in love with immortality, a freedom, a flight in paradise.”