Bittersweet Infamy - #89 - To the Island

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Josie tells Taylor about the life and letters of New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who was scheduled for a lobotomy when her debut book won a national prize. Plus: keeping it Kiwi with a report back from Josie and Mitchell's van life honeymoon on New Zealand's South Island.

Music Welcome to Bittersweetim. I'm Taylor Vaso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on and in the... The strange and the familiar? The tragic and the comic? The bitter and the sweet. So this is it, our first Bitterstersweet infamy episode of 2024. It feels different, don't you think? 2024.

No, it does. It feels like longer straighter, a little bit taller, thinned out. Yeah. Kind of like a nine, but pointy. Yeah, yeah, pointy nine. Yeah. Welcome to the pointy nine. 29 vibes.

It's also a leap year. Welcome to the pointy nine, clouds. It also a leap year. The pointy nine clouds is 20 49 What leap it is a leap year. Oh damn, so we got 366 days coming this year. What are you gonna do with that extra day Josie? Oh Gosh, I don't know my employer will probably try and take it from me So I will But no answer me what does one do with an extra day in a year? What does one do with a leap day? I don't know, I'm just thinking like nice Sunday thoughts, like wake up late, make eggs and walk.

How about wake up early and make that bread and run to the bank? Cold shower. Oh, you know me. You know if it's not, if your balls aren't going back into your body, it's not a shower with having. And that's what I say. Hypothetically, I think what I would do with an extra day is I would spend it with a

friend. Is it me? It could be. Yeah. I hope. If you want to spend February 29 together, I'm so okay with that. I didn't have any friend in mind when I said it, but it could be you. This too could be yours.

Um, no, I- well, I specifically, uh, what put me in mind of that was I've been very grateful to see friends recently. And specifically, I've been grateful to see podcast friends recently. Uh, Ramon Eski-Vell, who did episode 44, Bloodbath on Broadway, the Carey the Musical, which was not great. The episode, not the musical. The classic, yeah. It's all. Who's to say, who's to say, well, you tend to find on

Bittersweetim for me that we love the batter the most, right? And so this is one of those. Weird art. And he's weird art. Yeah, very weird art. say, well, you tend to find on bitter sweetened for me that we love the batter at the most, right? And so this is one of those. Weird art. And he's weird art. Yeah, very weird art, very, very misguided. I would say, or perhaps like, who's to say misguided, but it was interestingly guided art.

Yes. Grace was the prompt and then they didn't. Grace was the prompt, yeah. Grace was lured. That Grace was the word. But it didn't go so good. And you can, if you want to know what that means, you can go back and should go back and check out that episode, episode 44.

Anyway, he was in town because he's driving up the coast doing Sasquatch research for a Sasquatch themed play that he's writing. Oh my God. That's red. Does he have a title? Yeah. I think I got a little, I don't know if he has a title yet. He got a little granteato for it. And it's still very in the like,

let me go and look up like the local lore because Sasquatch is like a West Coast baby, right? He runs from BC all the way down to Mexico basically. Yeah, and Sasquatch and Bigfoot are the same, the same. Same guy, same guy, same basic guy. They're like a bomb and a bull snowman and Yeti, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't, it was, we don't know. She wasn't wearing a yellow jacket. Although there was someone else there wearing a yellow jacket.

So I turned to her and was like, look, someone else from yellow jackets is here. I was really proud of that one. That's cute, that's good. You should, I'm glad that made it onto a recording. Oh, please. Yeah, let's, the world needs to know how good I am at Jack economy.

And then also, and then the week after that, I got to see another one of our beloved bittersweet and for me guest hosts. She hosted episode 29, come with me and be immortal about the true story behind the movie Candy Man and the Cabrini Green Projects in Chicago. That of course is Nadine Baychan. I saw her. She is...

Oh! ...do with a... with a babby. On January 21st. Oh, fuck! She's ready! She's... Yeah. She sure is! Oh, man! I'm excited for her and for Brody, her partner.

Um, really nice couple. It was really nice to see Nadine and we met at Grounds for Coffee on Omnistry, which is that one by the 99 stop that always smells like cinnamon buns. Mm-hmm. I know that one. You know, like the place that always smells like cinnamon buns. Yeah, you're on the 99 and you smell, yeah. Yeah. Smell the cinnamon buns.

Yeah, we went there. I didn't have a cinnamon bun, but I did. You smell them. Have and it's also. Yeah, I've smoked they smoke great And with that in mind Since we're talking about You know guest host podcasts business. Hey, if you want to show us that you appreciate us in the near Want you think about leaving us a review on Apple podcasts on Spotify. You can leave reviews now

Any service that you use where you're able to like leave a written review. It's you know a specific five stars please, if you don't like us please don't leave a review, but if you do like us leave a review. Or like do you can also be one of those people who's like to guilt-ridden to affect our numerical rating, but then you say whatever crazy shit you want to in the actual comment. That's cool too. I've got actually actually, you know what? Well, depending on what you're depending on what you write, maybe please don't you know what? It's just leave us a comment. I review like, rate and subscribe and that's it. That's it. That's what I would leap into. That's what I would do with my ex-day in this leap year is I would take that day pencil it in February 29th. Let those or even honestly sooner would be great, but if not, February 29th, and leave a survey here, please and thank you.

Oh, yeah, please, thank you. I kind of had an extra day. Yeah. Because I crossed the international date line recently. Right. We will get into all of that as you all faithful listeners will know. Josie did go to New Zealand for her honeymoon. We will be getting all into all of that, especially because it means I didn't have to prepare. I'm been famous for this episode. What was what was it like crossing the international date line going there? We lost today.

We flew out Wednesday night and arrived Friday morning and we were like flying for 12 hours. So we weren't flying for like, you know, 36 or whatever. And that was actually pretty okay because we like the sun went down and then we tried to sleep, failed to sleep, and then the sun rose and then we were awake. And it felt like a pretty natural switch. I just felt like you'd gotten a shitty night's sleep. Yeah, yeah, pretty much, yeah. But I think coming back was weirder because we left on a Monday at 7.30 PM

and we landed that same Monday at 2.30 PM. Is that why people from New Zealand and Australia talk like that because of the time travel sickness? I think that might be it. Yeah, the Northern hemisphere, Southern hemisphere, the switch of room. Yeah, it changes the way your brain develops. It just like the toilet water goes the other way.

Your brain develops. It's exactly the brain. The other way. That cerebellum, that cerebrum, the id, maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's all different down there. Yeah. Yep, the hierarchies upside down. The night sky. That's a down, upside down triangle. Upside down. That's true. Okay, so what was tell me about landing in New Zealand? Tell me about landing in New Zealand.

Don't I sound like everybody you met on your honeyroot? Everybody, yeah. Thing! Let me think me think well landing. We first landed in Auckland Which is on the north island, but most of our time was spent on the south island. So we immediately got on. So can I ask yeah, no, I'd be even before you get out of there. Yeah, I feel like Auckland would have a nice airport. Is that true? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Good to know my yeah. Yeah. Okay, good to know. My, my dars is still thinking, good to know, continue. Yeah. Fun.

What was your van like? So we landed in Auckland and then, because we spent most of our time in the South Island, we flew to Queenstown, which is the southernmost big-ish town on the South Island. And that's where we rented a camper van, which is a very easy thing to do in New Zealand. A lot of people do it. It was a lot of foreigners renting campervans like us, but then it looked like a lot of Kiwis were also doing it. Interesting. Yeah. And we had a big boy. It was like a three-person birth. So they were like It was like a three person birth. So they were like a big bed in the back.

B-E-R-T-E-S. Got it. Yeah, there we go. Got it. Van Lingo, Van Lai-Hash Tag. That's, you know, like, hot hot hot hot. Oh, shit, oh shit. Nancy Vanshell over here. Big bed in the back.

And then like a little singlet twin pull out the you could do towards the front. Cool. And a full, like, a kitchen with a four stove top burners, a sink, a sizable fridge. They got caught in there. A table. They fit, they fit some shit there. A shower.

A toilet. A toilet. That we were scared of the toilet. So we never used the toilet. Why were you scared of what you thought you were going to like need to do the septic of it all or something? We would have had to have done the septic of it all. Yeah, okay.

Well, I can, I can shit and, and trees. That's fine. Yeah. No, well, and that was the other thing. We were like, okay, if we're in a situation where we need to use it, we will. But we never found ourselves in a situation where it was like very dire. It was like, can we walk the three minutes to the public washroom that's available in every campsite,

and there's a campsite every like 20 kilometers on the road. Nice. I think we can do that. That's nice. Yeah. So just like a camping honeymoon, how lovely. Yeah, but it was deluxe though, because we had this like,

it was a Mercedes camper van. A Mercedes, I didn't know. I didn't know I was speaking to Jeff Bezos. We got upgraded without knowing it. We just showed up and they're like, oh, you've been so that was cool. You look like you have a Pinterest account. Why don't we give you that? Mm-hmm. Yeah, that was it. And what were the stars like? What were the stars like down there? Were they as pretty as you thought they would be? Yeah, they were that one of the nights we were in the McKinsey dark sky reserve Which has like very very low Very low light. I didn't I forget the whole scale. If you try to light a cigarette there

They shoot a tranquilizer into your neck. So I hear, because it, it compromises the ambient light. I mean, I think that might be true in all of New Zealand. It's a lot. Really? No smoking and no vaping. Vaping is rough. Get off my dick, just send a big vape. Like, come on, let me, come on, let me just send it out there anymore. Just send a, I said, I, yeah, right. Just send it. Just send it. It's like like I'm done to you. I'm gonna go vape I'm gonna go vape in one of the in one of the three vape stations in the entire South Island But the McKinsey dark sky reserve There's a scale of light pollution that goes from one to nine and where we were was a 1.5

so it's like super super low and was a 1.5 so it was like super super low and we got to do a star gazing little escapade. How fun. Because big old telescope. But we got to see the Southern Cross which is only visible in the Southern hemisphere. Yeah Southern Cross. Okay. Any other constellations? Well we saw we saw one that you can still see in the Northern Hemisphere, but in New Zealand, the Maori have a different name for it, and it has totally different connotations. Oh, so it's upside down. It's totally different from basically constellation.

Yeah, so Pleiades, which is also the Seven Sisters. Yep. And it's also in Japan, it's Subaru. It's the insignia for Subaru. Oh, I know, I know, I'm Subaru. Wow, yeah, craze, what a, this is a very famous constantly. I guess everyone, I was gonna,

I was gonna vote to say I guess everyone has the same sky, but we're literally talking about that, so not true. Not always, yeah. Interesting. Mauri, it's called Madarikiiki and it rises off of the horizon, meaning it like enters the night sky that far south as winter is finishing. So it heralds the Essentially the new year in Maori tradition when you see Madariki. Oh, how apt. Yeah, yeah And so it rises in June in the middle of their winter.

Tell me a little bit about like the natural environment of the place. What are we looking at? We're looking at rural in hills. We're looking at patched dizzits. Are we looking at, what are we looking at? We're looking at Lord of the Rings. I think that's Lord of the Rings.

We are watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy. What was the food like? Now we didn't spend a lot of time in the North Island, like very little. But in the South Island, there is a lot of meat. There's a lot of... Why would things a lot of sheep? So many sheep. So many sheep.

Sheep. Ah! Dozy. Dozy. Dozy. Yeah, we were at a campsite and I was like, what is that sound? I was like, oh, it's a sheep. Yeah, that's sheep.

Not a sheep in sight. You just heard a sheep through the different kinds of sheep. The trees. Um, Proud of the diversity of sheep. You weren't looking. You didn't look at you just, oh, that's a sheep. Where's your curiosity about sheep, man? Sorry, I was interested in the endangered birds that I got to see. Tell me about these endangered birds, these uh, kukourojos and kukouburs and such and whatnot.

They got good birds down there is what I hear. Oh, best birds. The, probably the coolest one we saw was called a takahe. And- Oh! It is! That's fun, that's a fun name. Yeah, very fun name.

It's got like a flat line above the first A, I think, maybe the last A as well, so very good right now. And it's about the size of a chicken. It's also flightless. It is blue, like a dark blue situation, a very strong, very orange beak going on, bright orange little featsies, and it's nearly endangered. They only live in the very south of the South Island in Fjordland National Park area. The ones that we got to see were in a rehabilitation area, like a little enclosure. It's very cool because it wasn't a zoo. It was part of a public park

that you could just walk in, like we walked in with this guy and his baby and a stroller and his little dog Poppy, who was just running circles around everything, like going crazy. Poppy was cool. Cute. And yeah, the Takahe, we're just chilling' very curious. They really wanted to know what Poppy was about and Poppy wanted to know what they were about. And yeah, yeah, it was a mutual fascination. They were cool. Interesting. And while as we were driving, we saw a lot of New Zealand falcons. That was cool. Oh, cool. Yeah, very beautiful, very big.

It's really. You were telling me recently some fun fact about the mammals on that island right here? Uh, apparently, until the mowry arrived in about the 1500s, the only mammal, land mammal on the New Zealand Islands was the long tailed bat. So objection, you call it a land mammal, but it has wing. Oh, air mammal. Yeah. Well, it's just two distinguished seals,

which like, I don't know, it like makes more sense that they would see. I got you where like marine mammals kind of thing. Okay, sure, sure. Interesting, interesting either way. Yeah. Okay, so to ask you about another type of animalimo, what of that glow worm cave that you mentioned? Did you end up going to this? Yeah, that was so tight. I have to say New Zealand tourist attractions. It's a

tourist trap. Well, that's like we were just ready to be like tourist trap us away. I want to see a glow worm. I want to buy a stuffed glow worm at the end. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh you know, oh, let's get a little glower for Batman. I want a CD of glow worm songs like I want, and I want like the actual glow worms to be kind of lame, but the pictures are really cool and stuff. Yeah sure, and you can put like a $5 extra for a glow worm frame around the outside. Yeah, yeah Like me like in a glow worm face like that's all I'm We were ready for that perfect, but then it was like extremely legit. We took a bow I bet The this long lake this like narrow long lake that's all over the South Island these long lakes

And so we took a boat for like 20 minutes and they tooled us around. That's how you know it's legit. They had to take a boat for 20 minutes. Well, they tooled us around some very cool geological fixtures of the lake, like this specific mountain and da-da-da. And then they dropped us off at a heart or you know a pier and all 70 of us who were on the boat got off and then we had this little information session that was absolutely hilarious because they broke us up into smaller groups so there were about 12 people at a time who entered the cave and looked at the glow worms and stuff. So as you waited, you got this little informational session. So the first guy who comes around, he's like, hi, Mike, super gregarious, really nice,

tall white guy New Zealander, just like short shorts and life vest. It was just like, okay, yeah, this is totally. And then the next guy comes and he looks kind of similar but you can tell that he's very shy. He does not like to give these talks. He likes to be in the cave with the glow worms and not talking. Oh, he's not in it for the pre-warmed seminar. He just wants to be amongst the worms

in a quiet dark place. His favorite time is when the tourist rotation stops and you can just be alone with a worm and cave. Yeah, yeah. And you can tell that he had been through all the training and probably watched some other people give this talk. And so he like, he has all the beats and he has all the little jokes

and he has all everything structured and he goes through it. But he like can't quite do it. So there's one point when he's talking about how the glow worms will eat moths and so he asks the group, he's like, what's the softest part of the moth? And everyone's like, uh, the wings. No, the thorax, no, the, the, the antenna. No, and then Mitchell's like, the eyes. And the guy turns to me, he's like, bang on.

Ah! Yes, it's Ted Smogler, man, I love him. But honestly, I bet if like, Tanshad Budgy Smugglers, the first guy was giving you, it's not as good. No, I like it to be slightly askew, you know? It gives you something to chew on. And there was one other, like, because these are little glow worms, they light up, and he had this little joke about a glow worm eating a moth, and it was like,

like lunch, and stool silence, stool silence. Oh, no, that's very good, that's. That's so... Then there's a sweet woman in the front who was like I'm sorry what did you say? And he goes, loit launch. And everyone goes like, oh that's good that's good. But he was just like going too fast and not waiting for us to. Oh he's not a comedian he's a scientist maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Oh dear. And so we entered the cave and they had built these like metal walkways so that you could go through. And it's all like very stable, very chill.

Your first dive into the cave, you have to get very, very low. Like, Maksha was almost like crawling on his hands and knees because he's tall. I don't like that. I don't care for it. I'm not. I don't know that you and I have ever really been in a situation to like explore my claustrophobia, but I re-like the idea of going down into a cave like that is very disconcerting to me. I don't like it, not one bit. But yeah, good worms. Great worms.

We walked all the way to the back of the cave and there's water moving through this cave. And they get us in this boat, only the 12 of us, and they turn off all the lights and bang on boy, moves us through the cave on these chains that are installed into the wall and we move like deep into the cave and our eyes now have adjusted to complete darkness. And you look up and it's like, it looks like the inside of a church almost. The way that the- Wow, that sounds beautiful.

Love worms. It was just like, make sure that I both were like those. Kinda like a spiritual. Moving, yeah, really moving. The wonder, ah, ah baby, ah. The ah, the wonder, yeah. And it was just, I don't know, it was really,

it was really wild, because you couldn't see anything in front of you. Yeah. Like, I was sitting next to Mitchell, so I knew that his shoulder was there, but I couldn't see it. And you just like, had your neck up this whole time, like, looking at these little worms.

And they wouldn't be like, constantly on. They would, maybe some would dim, but then others would brighten and like, ooo, I want to do acid and go like a bat. Well, not in the case. No, my god, you're so right. With a terrible idea, Taylor. Revoke your vote.

No, you're living it. Play within it. But it was like, again, we were set up for like, take our money. We're dumb tourists. I want a glowworm doll. Yeah, did you get the glow worm doll? What we got was no, they didn't even have them. That's dumb. Okay. Now, now we have words because a key chain size guy. Come on. You're not these people look at you've got rooms like

Josie and myself coming in there when I was in fucking the see Japan had the right idea. They've got those little like batch of machines on every corner. So like the second you want to just feed urge to have done little toy, you just plug in a corner and, oh, something comes out of a little plastic ball. It's great. That is beautiful. And I would have bought it and cherished it and loved it forever.

But I wasn't there. Just the memory. Just the memory that glowing in the darkness of the void. What else did you? We went up to the Mt. Cook, Aoraki area and we did a hike. We attempted a hike. Well it attempts to just that perhaps it was not seen through the completion. So that's something interesting about Kiwi language around hiking and walking. We read about this hike and decided,

okay, it's a three hour hike, like that's a long, a longish one, but it was described as an energetic hike to Alpine Lake, up to Alpine Lake. And you didn't know that meant hard? Well, I thought that... I'm sorry, why, you could, that bands on you. I'm sorry.

I thought he would be, why? You could- That bands on you. It's for you. I thought he would be energetic means like, poop, poop, like you're gonna be like red faced and like sweating and like probably if you have like a heart condition you shouldn't attempt this that's what I would think energetic means That was what it was it was like 2000 steps straight up we got to the point where we were taking 10 at a time and then had to break for about five minutes That's a nightmare That's a nightmare. That's a nightmare.

Oh. And everybody on the way down was like, you're almost there. It's worth the views. It's worth the views. And it is a shut up. And we were like, no, it's not. Well, because then you would turn around

and it's like, you saw Mt. Cook and you saw these two beautiful crystalline alpine lakes and you saw the whole valley before you. It's all pretty. And it's just like, this is all pretty big. The top is relative. The top is rough. The top is where you wherever you set up camp in my opinion. This is my top. Yeah. This is my top and at the same time I've bottomed out. Like I'm good. No, definitely. It's hard to be taken aback by a hike. I can relate to that situation. But it was still really nice, because the views were lovely.

I bet. I bet. That was good. And what else do we do? Yielded each other a lot with the driving. There was a lot of like, you're too close! You're too close! Did they drive?

They're side of the road down there. They do. That, they do. Which one of you is the stressy driver? I think it's me. I think it's more her mother's daughter. Yeah, sure enough. I remember I remember reading short stories from you about Alice bitch in the car and here you are perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Yeah baby. That's what I do. Northern hemisphere southern hemisphere. No matter. Well, why she's world wide folks. That cycle just goes the other way.

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Yeah, sounds nice. Sounds like you had a really nice time. One last question. Did you see Wing? No.

Did you find Wing? No! Did you find Wing? Did you track down Wing while you were in New Zealand? Ah, damn it. Where does Wing even live in New Zealand? We don't know. She was originally the place that she took off in was a record store in Dunedin,

which I believe is on the South Island. But Wing herself might actually be from Auckland. Now that I think about it. So perhaps that's why you perhaps wing lives in the north island okay Josie I want you to rest your beautiful vocal cords while I plug this shit out of this because I feel like this episode has you doing a disproportionate amount of talking I'm like I still like a half hour long interview of you and then you're gonna tell a story I I've brought nothing to this one, folks.

Nothing at all. And I'm not doing anything. You're having fun, you're charming, you're with. Thank you, thank you. So over on the Better Sweet Film Club, which is our monthly film discussion club every month we do in the evening. This is sound of the film.

Yeah. Take it, take it, take it, take it. This coming Sunday, not the Sunday that this podcast drops, but the next one January 21st. We will be dropping an episode on Heavenly Creatures, Mitchell Collins, Josie's new van life husband. He's going to be there discussing with us a Peter Jackson flick. Really good. Kate Winslet's first ever film role, Melanie Linsky. And same with Melanie Linsky, yeah.

Every, every, the, the stars are all here and they are shiny. They're showing out. Oh, man. Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson movie, filmed in set in New Zealand, about the real life murder of a Nora Reaper by her daughter, Pauline and by Pauline's friend Juliet Hume. So it's got a lot of overlap with this podcast. It's a very infamous story and it takes all kinds of twists and turns. You're gonna want to hear all about it and you're all about us chatting about this great Peter Jackson film.

I gotta say it is like distilled, bittersweet, and it's like very crystalline. Very revive. Very revive. It was like us. Crystal in. Very our vibe. Very our vibe. It was like, because I'd never seen it before. Right. Whoa. We'll get all into it. We'll get right into it.

Yeah. The way that you access that is you pay us, you sign up as a monthly subscriber over at coffee.kio-fi.com. Slash bittersweet in for me. Slash. It's three bucks or whatever you want. Secretly, I think you can probably access it if you don't do monthly donations too,

but it won't get it every month. And you're gonna want to hear this every month. Yeah. And we're also gonna reveal what we're gonna be doing in the next episode. So go give us a listen. That'll drop January 21st, our discussion of heavenly creatures on the bittersweet episode.

The next film club episode. Yes, the next film club episode. Episode three. Episode three, it's a new, she's new, but she's young, she's robust, and she's taken the world by a storm. Better Sweet Film Club, give us a listen over at coffee.com. Hi again, this is Josie. I just wanted to pop in here and say that in this upcoming story, Taylor and I do discuss suicide, a suicide attempt, and we have a pretty in-depth conversation about mental health and mental illness.

If you need a little bit more space from those topics right now, by all means take that space, and please take care. Alright, so, Josie, that's enough from you about your honeymoon. Tell me about something else. Tell me about something. I'm gonna miss please and thank you. Do you know this very famous, very well-loved and well-liked and highly lauded New Zealand author Janet Frame? No, the name doesn't ring about. Okay, cool. Cause that was me as well a few years ago before I happened upon her and going to New Zealand, well, for my birthday actually, Michele got me a whole bunch of New Zealand books to read and take with us and stuff.

And he was researching and finding stuff and I think out of the four books he got me like three Janet frame books because she always is on like the list of New Zealand Kiwi writers. She like she takes like the top three spots. Sure, but she has kind of a wild story. Okay. So patron saint of New Zealand letters. Let's just put it put it bluntly. She's the author of 12 novels, four short story collections, one book of poetry, three volumes of autobiography, throw in a few kids' books, and a whole slew of single-shot stories that are published in different publications. Sure. A woman for all seasons clearly. Her style of prose is wildly creative,

like really out there, but very grounded at the same time. Make sure to tell me about short story that he read of hers last night, where it's different berry bushes talking to each other. And that's the whole story. Sure. Sure. And it's dope and wild.

And a lot of people have said that she's kind of And that's the whole story. Sure. Sure. And it's dope and wild. And a lot of people have said that she's kind of the harbinger of a modernist movement. But she also has like a lot of these magical realism elements that I know you like a lot. Yeah. She's very rooted in New Zealand landscapes and in New Zealand any type of nature. She's Kiwi herself, she's from New Zealand, but a lot of her inspiration comes from the plants, the flora, the fauna that surrounded her. She has these very poetic, meandering plot structures when it comes to her prose. Her poetry feels even a little more

prosaic though. She's kind of like, she's a little more prose poetry. So she's kind of like, she's, yeah, a woman of all seasons, is that what you said? Something like that. I say a lot to share. Yeah. It's not right now. She had this gnarly shock of red hair, curly red hair that she would wear kind of short so it bushed Annie the summer come out tomorrow. A little bit more on her. A classic style. And she has long been seen as reclusive and kind of isolated, I should say,

the media picked up on like very strong weird O vibes. Like, she was just, but people went so far to also just consider her this mad artist. Yeah, if anyone can get away with it too, it's artists, right? Because people expect you to like, I always, that's what I tell people when, when I tell my grandpa, he's worried about my haircuts and my tattoos and she'll be like, I'm a creative type. We're allowed to, we don't have to wear suits, it's fine. The Kiwi media, and we'll say the British media too, because it was kind of part of this whole publishing world

that gets tied back to London. But they went so far to think that perhaps she was autistic or that her brilliance as a writer was kind of a side effect of her mental illness. Sure, okay. And it's not necessarily unfounded. I'd say it's unnewanced, but she did spend eight years in her 20s institutionalized in a mental home.

It was called a mental home at the time, and she was exposed to electric shock therapy, countless medications, and when none of that seemed to be working according to her doctors, she was prescribed a lobotomy in her late 20s. Oh no! It was a handful of days before her procedure that her book of short stories called The Lagoon and Other Short Stories, which was published in 1951. So this was maybe about a year later. It won the prestigious Hubert Church award, which at the time was the only literary award in New Zealand.

So it was like a very like, TV letters, like you are kind of cemented. And her doctors heard this news to she had won this amazing award and her lobotomy was canceled. Oh, thank God. Thank you, Hubert. Yeah. Thank you you Hubert. Yeah. Thank you Hubert. Oh that's that that. Oh that gives me chills. That gives me chills. What a what a twist of fate. Isn't that fucking wild? So shortly after that she was released. She was given back her independence. She was not anybody's dependent. So she left and lived an independent life and pursued a very prosperous and renowned career as a writer as arguably the writer of New Zealand. Sure. And still media has

read that, has understood that and just transferred that to this idea of like her brilliance is this byproduct of her madness and that she's like a bit of a loony Which like how might Sylvia Plath Vincent Benco yeah, you know what I mean, who among us? Who are like, yeah. This is such a thing, right? The marriage of like the mentally ill artist to their mentally illness, the question of like romanticizing it to what degree was the mental illness responsible for it, where they mentally, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's interesting having to find your own relationship

between your mental illness and your creativity in an industry that I think often glamorizes misery. Yeah, dog. That's something that I had to go through that's something that I personally found. At least I can't speak for everybody with mental illness, but I often thought like, you know, lean into the skit itself's better question mark.

There's weird, there's all kinds of weird interplays around it that can be like really harrowing and upsetting and yeah and it's very easy to direct them at people who when the person is visibly eccentric let's say it's easy to ascribe mental illness and that's not to say that she's not mentally ill but it's easy to make all of these like presumptions and um conclusions about she's a great artist it must be because because she like, in her madness has access to something that the rest of us don't. Or you know, it's that kind of, I don't know. Yeah.

Well, I, uh, I'm gonna tell you the story of Janet Frame. And it's a funny situation that I think both of us had maybe found ourselves in and telling these stories in that there's kind of the dominant narrative that in this case it's her being like mentally ill, the mad artist, the mad woman, and then in telling her story, I have to share that as context, but then the whole story is about subverting that. Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about. I know you're talking about.

And it's kind of like, well, why bring it up at all? But it's like, but that's, that's, I don't know. It's part of it. It's the intersection. You can't even shy away from it, I don't think. Right, yeah, it becomes part of the narrative in a way. Yeah. But before I do that, I'm going to read a poem of Janet Frames,

because I think. Oh, okay, sure. Yeah, just to give you kind of a sense of what, of what she's doing. And I think her poetry is different from her novel writing, but her novel writing is different from our short stories and our short stories. She has, as we say, many, many coats.

Many, many, yes. Yes. Yeah, well, I like it. I was just saying, we're saying it. She's wearing a lot of coats. She's got different coats. Spring coats, winter coats, mac and os, everything. Yeah, little windbreakers. Yeah, Adidas, Adelizier, it's all happening. So this is from her book of poems called The Pocket Mirror. Okay. And it was published in 1967. She's born in 24, so she's kind of working in this, that era of the 20th century. So this poem is Rain on the Roof. My nephew's sleeping in a basement room has put a sheet of iron outside his window to recapture the sound of falling rain on the roof. I do not say to him,

the heart has its own comfort for grief. A sheet of iron repairs roofs only. As yet unhurt by the demand the change and difference never show, he's still able to mend damages by creating the loved, rain sound he thinks he knew in early childhood. Nor do I say, in the traveling life of loss, iron is a burden, that one day he must find within himself in total darkness and silence, the iron that will hold not only the lost sound of the rain, but the sun, the voices of the dead, and all else that has gone. That's a, that's a big grim. Yeah. She has like a darker view, darker side. Yeah. I love the rain so

much and I, and I've always hoped that it's enough, but evidently, no, I've got to get over that. I've always hoped that it's enough, but I've not been able to get over that. But it's like trying to like recapture that moment, right? That's what she's saying. No, I know. I know, I know. That depressed me that poem. That's the rainbow we're flying in on Dario, okay? Let's go.

I'm sorry. I was a good poem. I enjoyed it. No, I wasn't right. I didn't, I'm not mad at the poem. It just, it made my, it struck a chord in my heart that made me a little sad. That's all. Fuck it. Fuck it. We bought. 1924.

Yeah. 100 years ago. What were you doing in 1924? What were you doing in 1924? I mean, I do a Ritees-assist to bring this bit back. What were you doing in 1924? I'm an adult. He's asked us to bring this bit back. What were you doing in 1924? In 1920. Can't say flappy. Can't say flapper. It's always flappy. He can't be flappy. Okay. I was wearing a head to toe bathing costume and attempting to go to the beach. a head-to-toe bathing costume and attempting to go to the beach. Slut. And they had to wheel me out in this like little

cubana. Yeah, I know those guys. You know those guys. Step down and get in the water like that so no one could see me. Yeah. Even those in head-to-toe kit wear. Wow. What a nightmare.

What a goddamn nightmare of society is. 1924. Where were you doing? Oh, don't say that, Taylor. That's really depressing. Oh no, oh no. Oh no. Injecting myself with things to try to stop myself

from being homosexual. Oh. Look what you did. Yeah, yeah. 1924. Let's go back. OK. Right back.

1924. Let's go back. Okay. Janet Frame is born in Dunedin, New Zealand. Oh, speak the devil. Yeah, famed wing album store. Wing launching point. The winging point for wings. Yes, she took wing right out of New Zealand. Right out of Dunedin, I should say. I didn't, and Mitchell, we did not know how to pronounce

this word for the longest time. I had to look it up before I did that story on wing and I was so glad that I did, because I wouldn't have got there. We, I think we were saying, D'Ned, D'Ned? I was saying D'Ned, the idiot. D'Ned, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no, the idiot is, it's rough. It's a very, very Scottish town, as you could probably hear. Daning. Daning. Daning. Daning. Yeah.

Yeah. I got you. It's in the South Island and it's on the east coast. We did not go. And I kind of wish that we did now. I was not how it goes. I mean, well, we got there and we're like, hey, maybe we could do that. Could we get down to Dunedin,

but we were pronouncing it wrong? Yeah. And we looked at the map and it was just like, it was gonna be like a whole six hours additional driving to what we had and it just wasn't gonna work. So. Sometimes when it's adding like hours onto your trip, it's just not worth it sometimes.

Yeah, you just have to cut your losses and read all about it and Janette Frame novels. Yeah, or just let Josie go down and do all her research for you and listen to it on this podcast. Boom, about a bang. So her father, George Samuel Frame, he was of Scottish descent, like most people in that area.

And he was a railway worker. He worked for the National Railway. And her mother was named Lottie Clarice Godfrey. She was of English descent and of notably a higher status than George. Ooh, one of those dirty dancing romances. It was a little bit because when they got together, they put baby in the corner. Yeah, her parents like baby goes in the corner or baby's out of here.

I guess I'm out of here then. Yeah, but even, even that said, her family who immigrated to New Zealand, they were of this like higher echelon, but over time, her parents were not that wealthy. And so her experience of the world was not really this doily's everywhere vibe. She wasn't Kate Winslet and Heavenly Creatures. No, she wasn't Kate Winslet and Heavenly Creatures. If only. Her family was no longer that high status, but they still read a lot. They still listened to all this types of music.

She worked as a housekeeper, Laughty Did, and she apparently connections to the literary world here. She was the housekeeper to the paternal grandmother of another famous writer of that era, female writer, Catherine Mansfield. Right. What was what did Catherine Mansfield write again? She's kind of known for like being a short story writer and kind of helping to create the

genre. Miss Brill! Catherine Mansfield wrote Miss Brill. I know the Garden Party. That's the one that I... I use Miss Brill in my tutoring all the time. Miss Brill is ticked. You want to talk about a fucking story that will just make you miserably sad at the end. Miss Brill. Miss Brill is that bitch. I have always loved Miss Brill. Miss Brill is not in

imposition. It is a very short story and it is very easy to find online. It will take you five minutes to read it. Go read Miss Braille. I like Miss Braille. Cool. Okay. I haven't read it. Oh, it's you, Josie, you will, you will love Miss Braille. It's, it's a seven-page story. I can do that. I can do that tonight. So sweet. Sweet. Anyway, as we were. So she, yeah, has these connections to the literary world. She also writes poetry. she writes short stories. Lottie does, this is Janet's mother. During the depression, she even sold her poems door to door.

Whoa, I didn't know that was an industry, a depression industry, nonetheless. Yeah, I don't think there was a lot of money passing out. I was gonna say, I don't know. But God, do something. What was the poetry budget when we didn't have food? I don't think there was a lot of money passing out. I was gonna say, I don't know. I gotta do something. What was the poetry budget when we didn't have food? I don't know about that. Lottie and George, they met through Lottie's brother.

And like we mentioned before, it was kind of a star crossed lover's situation where her family were not into it. And still, they married. Two weeks after they married, he joined the war effort and was sent off to Europe. Right, okay. Another reason for her family to not be all that stoked about it. But George meets another woman.

When he's a broad. These chips are broad. A nurse. Uh-oh. Yeah, a broad. And he writes to Ladi and he says, I'm asking for a divorce. I'm writes to Loddy and he says, I'm asking for a divorce, I'm not coming home.

I've fallen a little bit somewhere else. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks.

That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. That sucks. How no. You get back home. Oh, interesting. I wouldn't want to, I mean, I guess. I don't, I don't know what I listen. I'm, yeah. I'm grateful it's not my situation. How about that? Yes, yeah. Oh, that's awkward. Oh, oof. But he does come home. Oh, good of him. He comes home. They remain married. They, when he comes home, he gets a small stipend, enough that he can purchase a small house in a working class suburb of Teneedin.

His mother, Grandma Frame, is always around, which is very helpful because Lottie and George have five kids together. A lot of kids. The third of whom is Janet Patterson. That's her first and middle name. And Patterson is a maternal name down the line. Okay. And Janet was delivered by Dr. Emily Sidaberg who was the first female medical doctor in New Zealand. Interesting. Kind of

rad. Cool. That's in there. Also strange. Maybe not rad. Janet frame was an embryonic twin had an embryo she ate it Miss carried We don't I don't know that's not official listen listen. Okay, so wait did this is this is important I don't want to have this characterizes it as we're having eaten her twin in New York if that is not true. I Feel I feel some responsibility to clarify Not true. I feel I feel some responsibility to clarify. I cannot confirm nor did I have that she ate her twin.

So so don't go around telling people that this woman ate her twin. That was me. That was my interpretation of it, but it may not be case. Okay. So she was three of five kids. Janet was and despite some maybe rocky beginnings post-war, they were a very happy family. They were not wealthy, but...

But they were wealthy of heart and of community. Exactly. They also markedly loved language. The mother obviously wrote poems and recited poetry around the house. But even their father, there's a note from Janet that like particularly she remembers her dad reciting the names along the railway, like the railway station names and how like fun and like they were Maori names and they were Scottish names. Like this like big mashup and

like they were Maori names and they were Scottish names. Like those big mash-up and how that was like a this fuel for her love of language, but a very close-knit family. And the father who works for the railway, he gets kind of placed in different townships all the time. Different townships. Sorry, I'm gonna be piped in with those from time to time. No, I'm just, I'm surprised that we haven't yet though So this is good different townships. That was that one

Bang on bang on, but you okay? So here's what I will say. Okay. I think I can fake my way into a half-assed decent Australian accent I think my new Zeeland accent is much dodger and I don't I would need to listen to more New Zealand Media to kind of got the finer points of that accent. Yeah. How's your New Zealand accent? Did you pick up any tips when you were abroad? You know, it's probably not super good. I probably think it's better than it is, but I feel like there's certain things that I can get.

Bang on. You have to imagine Melanie Linsky saying it, Dibora, you know, it's just the kick-out. To Bora. Um, okay, the father gets moved around a bit, meaning the fair and the family with him. They move around the South Island quite a bit, but Janice spends the majority of her adolescence in Amaru, which is just north of Deniden. It's where wild blue penguins will come ashore. I can blue pay. I think they got all the same birds we got but they're blue. It's amazing.

It's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Rolling Green Hills, the village of Red Roots, the family is surrounded by gorgeous nature, birds, flowers. Yeah. Hobbits. All different types of plants. Yeah, it's it's all like baked into Janet in this in this way. But it's not all idyllic, her adolescence, her brother suffered from what we would now call epilepsy. Right. So there was a lot of kind of drama around that at home. But also when Janet was about 12 years old, one of her sisters drowned. And apparently Janet and her had had an argument and the sister, oh no, no, no, no, went to the beach. Yeah. Oh, that's awful. Oh, you hate to hear that. Oh. yeah. And that's the first sister that drowned. Oh no. And Janet's early 20s her second sister drowned. Water safety. No joke. Apparently Janet was not comfortable around boats or swimming. She was not me neither. Me neither. Me neither.

It's a stalemate. It's it's dry. Are here Dole listen to Josie with her fucking we can go that it's only it's only a nine out of ten bone shattering current We can go there for a quick rough and tumble 30 minutes swim. Fuck no. If I stay dry get a towel Fair, perfect So when Jenna is in her late teens, early 20s, she attends uh, Dunedin's teacher training college, which at the time was called the training college. Well. And uh, this is like the mid 40s. There weren't a lot of opportunities for women to take on careers. It was nurse, librarian or teacher. Yeah, teacher, mother. Mother. Yeah, all of those eventually leading to mother.

Yeah. Okay, so Janet goes to teacher training college, even though she really is not interested in being a teacher, but it's the best option that she can think of. And she meets a dear friend who stands out in this narrative, just because I found an interview where she gave a lot of them for me. Sure, so she's a source. Yeah, Sheila Letouch is her dear friend. Also, Sheila has a fantastic name. Oh, Letouch.

Sheila Letouch. Yeah. That's a great like Euro disco name if you want to like do some, if you want to do a pop song in Italy, just as like Letouch, you could do that. That's true, true, single name. And Sheila Litush says that Janet at that time confided in her that she was thinking at the time Janet was that she might have some mental illness. She was concerned about that, concerned about depression, concerned about maybe anxiety. And Sheila describes her as being a very, very shy person.

She would always look at her shoes. She would never look up at people. And she definitely moved through social settings as an outsider. She was always just kind of a little bit removed, always looking down. But it was very clear that she was extremely intellectual and that she was very creative. Both of them really loved writing and poetry,

and that's kind of what sparked their friendship, but Sheila could tell that Janet had this like incredible imagination that she was drawing from. Janet went to study psychology at the university, kind of an auxiliary almost like auditing classes there, and the lecturer of her class, her psychology class, was a man named John Money, Dr. John Money, and she started, according to she let quote, she took him into her confidence. So she was telling him these concerns that she had about her mental illness. She apparently was and this was at his request to bringing her dreams. This was kind of an era of dream analysis. Right. Right, but I worry. I worry because she seems pretty vulnerable. Exactly. And part of that vulnerability is that she develops a pretty hardcore crush on Dr. John no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no So a very like crushing crush right the crush Alicia Silverstone the crash I understand

You just got a punch him in the face look of flying off the carousel and everything's fine And then John money this doctor this lecturer announced that he was moving away He was taking a position in another country. He was going to the States, I think. Sure. And she was so overwhelmed and so saddened by that, that she attempted suicide by overdosing on a bottle of aspirus, aspirin, which she took an amount that would not have

fatally damaged her, but she was bedridden for some time, and word had gotten back to the department, the psychology department, and the head of the department was worried enough about this situation where a female student was so taken with a lecturer and da da da, so that weekend the department heads visited her at her home and urged her to visit the hospital. And not just any hospital hospital but the mental home. The mental home. It's for thing. For thing. It was called sea cliff and it was just outside of Amaru.

It sounds very idyllic. I worry about putting that home in proximity to glyphs, but or the sea. What I will say is I feel really bad for anybody who I guess has to be institutionalized at any point at any time, but like, not because I think that there's anything wrong with needing help in your darkest hour, but just because like, you think of the ways in which we know that so many of those facilities are deficient today, and then you try to transport yourself back to like rural New Zealand in the 40s. So these first few weeks in the mental home at C-cliff, she was given the option to be released, but in order to do that she would have had to have become a dependent of her parents again. And by this time she was an adult and she said, well, I don't, I don't want to do that.

It was going to be kind of like a Britney Spears situation. That's the sense I get. It was like, you will have absolutely no rights. You cannot make any of your own decisions. You will essentially be an invalid at home. She was like, that's not, no, I'm not, I'm not doing that. She was like, fuck it, give me the lobotomy. Well, I think things perhaps escalated in that sense, right?

Because at the beginning, it was a little bit chiller. In fact, Sheila Lattouche has a fragment of a letter that Janet wrote to her from that time when she was at seacliff. And it goes, I go to the park and sit on a rug and read and write. There are patients walking here in the park and there's a path to be walked on and the people go round and round and round. Some sit. The sun is bright, they shade their eyes, the sky is so blue. Today, of course, is the last day of summer. But goodbye for now. I suppose I'd go on and on and on if I didn't remember not to. How silly.

Goodbye, love, Jean. And Jean is a nickname that she was called. Like Janet was called. Sure. So it starts with like, perhaps some chiller vibes, reading and writing and doing what she wants. Yeah.

And this guy's very blue. Look at how blue he on sky. Yeah, if Tick-Tick College wasn't really for her anyway, and also you noted too that she's kind of in this very vulnerable state, she's already thinking that she is having some issues with her mental health. And so I think it just kind of like builds and builds, and at a certain point she's diagnosed with schizophrenia. Okay. Which I imagine the reality of managing something like schizophrenia is a lot different in the time that we're talking about them is no. Right.

Yeah, because it involved electroshopping therapy and probably some very intense dosages of medicines that are no longer legal and the prospect of a lobotomy, which is wild. Yeah. What can you tell us about lobotomies, Josie? Lobotomies are procedures that are no longer done or shouldn't be done, where certain nerves in the brain are severed. And the idea is that it will alleviate somebody's mental suffering if you are thinking about it that way. But essentially what they do is they reduce cognitive function.

They can reduce motor functions. They can, at their worst, put you in a vegetative state. Yes. They are not medicine. They are a form of torture. They're... Yeah.

A very anti-labotomy. Yeah, we don't... Let's come out. I'm always stepping on eggshells because I don't want to offend anybody, but I'm anti-labotomy. I will definitely go on the record with that. Yeah. They have this a very like a really specific history too that I've always been kind of scared to go into because it's such bad vibes.

Yeah. One of the Kennedys Rosemary, she got a lobotomy and it was that same like, she was acting out, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. She was both willful and maybe had some mental illnesses that we didn't know how to deal with at the time and this was what the solution was supposed to be and it was not the solution. No. And they do seem, I think, if you are looking at medical records, and I'm pulling this out of my butt, but it seems statistically more women receive lobotomies than men. Yeah. It feels that way.

And if you're thinking about the medical science surrounding hysteria and the mental health of women, not even the physical health of women, very limited, very incorrect in a lot of ways. Still with. It's a very easy thing for me to empathize with because I try to be pretty up front about my own struggles with mental illness and stuff like that. And I can very, ooh, I don't even wanna think about it. I can easily imagine it so easily.

Yeah. Ooh, yeah. And it makes me upset to think that like this is, this wasn't hypothetical for so many people and so many fat like I'm sure that there were yeah for everyone who was like Cruelty dealing with a problem. I'm sure there was like a set of concerned parents who had been told by medical professionals That this was the way to like get their daughter back or so you know what I mean right? Yeah Sick to think about totally or if it's not getting them back. It's like controlling

Yeah, so Janet frame is lucky enough that she had a collection of short stories that was published in 1951 it's her debut book her debut collection It was called the lagoon and other short stories. We love and other short stories. And other short stories. Yeah. The title story, the lagoon, is very short, not very long at all. And it is one of these kind of meandering plots that feels almost like a long poem, but then you get to the end and you realize that the structure is all like telling you a complete story beginning middle end. It has this recurring image of a lagoon and I'll read you the description of this recurring image It's through its recurrence that you learn about this family secret that the speaker of the story is

Learning and unirthing sure so the description of the lagoon learning and unearthing. Sure. So the description of the lagoon is, at low tide, there is no lagoon, only a stretch of dirty gray sand. I remember we used to skim thin white stones over the water and catch tiddlers in the little creek nearby and make sandcastles. This is my castle, we said,

you be father, I'll be mother, and we'll live here and catch crabs and titlers forever. So it comes up again and again, and you can tell the familial like elements that roll through the description that's tied to the lagoon too. And it's a really interesting short story because it doesn't feel like once upon a time, blah, blah, blah, it's got this a much more spiralized plot. This is the book that essentially saves her life because when Word is given that she has won the Herbert Church Award and I mentioned before that at the time this was the only literary award designed just for New Zealand authors. So people knew about it and it was you know it was a thing when the doctors heard that she had won this award for her book, for her writing, which they assumed must have just thought she was like scribbling, scribbling,

scribbling in a notebook. Right. They thought nobody who wanted prestigious award could be crazy. Yeah, or at least they thought, I guess, she doesn't need a lobotomy, but it was certainly enough that the media wanted to find her and did find her, and they found this whole story of her being in a mental institution and a mental home, and it was through kind of that pressure, and then probably some of her own self-confidence, and her family's confidence that like, you know what, she doesn't want neither the lobotomy to let's get her out of here. So she leaves Seacliffe and she goes to the North Island outside of Auckland and she lives in the garden shed of a famous New Zealand writer. His name is Frank Sargason and he's established writer and he kind of takes her under his wing and it's there that

she realizes that she could make a career of this. This could be her life. It doesn't have to be a teacher, doesn't have to be lobotomized, doesn't have to live at sea cliff. She could try and be a writer. So she's living in this garden shed and love it love it little um she said and Frank is mentoring her in some ways. He also has a few other prodejais and there's a point there where she's in this community of writers. She's working on

her novel during the day and then like playing the equivalent of like scrabble at night. It's like the bomb. She's she's she's fucking loving it. In 1957, Pegasus Press out of Christchurch, New Zealand, they publish her first novel entitled Owls Do Cry. Which they do. They really do. Oh, that looks really cute. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, And I think I mentioned this before, but this very keen sense of New Zealand. She captures it really well. And so this is just like a really brief description out of Al's du Kri. It was a place of white manuka and a river pool of brown ice and hills of green iron, with a cloud crossing the sky to send down a silver picnic rain like a new pin to be picked up. Later in the sunlight, in the tussic, or the bald feasting place charred with old tires

and strewn with yesterday's picnic paper and bottle and sardine tin. Sadine tin. Sadine tin. No, yeah, she's a very sensory, very descriptive. Yeah. And she also, something that gets further developed in Al's Do Cry, she has this very keen sense of character. She's fascinated by people. Like she loves

listening to folks. She might be very quiet individual, but she's always kind of like has an ear out for language, but an ear out for like what are people doing, deciding? Sounds like her brain's always on her. Oh yeah. Totally, yeah. And enough that Frank, after the book was published, after she got a little notoriety, more notoriety from it, he, I think probably

just got a little annoyed and he was like, you need to go, this is, we're annoyed and he was like, you need to go. This is, we're good, you're good, you're right. Get the fuck out of my shed. Yeah. I have, I have, the bags of fucking Pete have been sitting outside in the rain for three winters now, you can go. This is time. And he encourages her and as a mentor like that encouragement means a lot to go overseas and so she in 1957 after the publication of her first novel she spends the next decade almost working and living in Europe and Primarily she's based in London, but she has little, like, side excursions to Ibiza,

Ibiza. Ibiza! Let's get rowdy! And Endora. Endora! No, I don't know anything really about Endora. Yeah, that's right. It's between Spain and France.

That's what I knew about Endora. She's getting a little Mediterranean vibes here. She changes her name legally in 1958 to Nene, Janet, Peterson, Kootha. Okay. Part of it is that the media has been enraptured with her story, with this, you know, near lobotomy story, blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, changing your name makes her a little harder to pinpoint. Sure. Even when she's a broad. Paparazzi, you saw what they did to Princess Diana, don't think they won't do it to you.

It's spooky. So she changes her name so that she's not as recognizable, but she also wants to honor the Maori leader, Samati Waka Nene, whom she admired. Sure. So that's the Nene, and then the Kuta, at the end of her name, is to honor the Kuta River, which she grew up by. It's one of the natural elements that inspired her work. Around this time, she's extremely prolific. She's pumping out stories.

She's pumping out novels, poems, the whole thing. The whole thing. But she also feels like her mental health is kind of slipping a little bit. So she goes to see a doctor, a psychiatrist, who actually trained under John Money, who was the lecturer that she was obsessed with in college. Her, her boo, her boo thing. Her boo, yeah. And it was actually this psychiatrist, he proposed that she had never suffered from schizophrenia,

which she had been diagnosed when she was at sea cliff. And was the catalyst for the electro shock therapy, for the eventual therapy. A lot of you thought of therapy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no good. Hospitals, old hospitals, we're scared. Very, very scary.

Very scary. I find hospitals kind of scary, but then like a 1940s, 1950s hospital, terrifying. So with this proposition that she is not schizophrenic, she has regular therapy sessions with another psychiatrist, this Dr. Kali, who not only encouraged her to pursue her writing, but when media was so obsessed with her mental health

and the status of her mental health, he very kindly and very willingly wrote an official letter, like a doctor's letter Dear media this bitch is saying please leave her alone Pretty much got you. Yeah, and nothing that Janet carried it with her and like and shared it like I got it laminated Yeah, she was like this is can we not can you not ask me about yeah, because it's in the okay I have an wallet size. I have it in wallet size. Yeah. Yeah. She hasn't like printed on a business card that she hands out to people when they ask. Yeah. Yeah. And she was

so thankful for Dr. Collie. She really felt that he had delivered her from that that time in her life. So she's still writing prolifically. She is traveling widely. In 1963, she does move back to New Zealand. And she's kind of moving all over the country, North Island, South Island. She gets a residency here. She gets a fellowship here. It's kind of one of those things.

And during that time too, even though she lives officially in New Zealand, she's traveling to the States and meeting other writers, meeting other artists, kind of expanding her worldview, and her novels are deepening, and her writing is just flourishing. She's publishing prolifically. She's very well-known. She's kind of a like, cultural icon status at a certain point here. But the media is still, and perhaps her readership about extinction are still really fascinated and insistent on this mental health issue, kind of seeing her as the mad artist, right?

Right. You know, part of it is that she's not very interested in like being a society person. She's not really interested on like going on the talk shows. She doesn't give a lot of interviews. She, I mean, hell, she changed her name so that she could have a little bit more privacy, right? What she likes to do is write. She's not really even into all the publishing. She's into the writing.

I hear that. And so people I think are, are they're reading more of her work. She writes a book called Faces in the Water that's about somebody in a mental, how, at a mental institution. And so people like just keep wanting to tie her to this history that she has moved through that is no longer her and that like it was a mistaken diagnosis as well so it wasn't ever really her. So one interview that she does give that's pretty rare is a radio interview between her and Elizabeth Alley and I just want to read a little bit of it, so you can kinda see the way that the media is just kinda always circling this question

of her mental health. Sure. So Elizabeth Alley asks the question, it's like a Q&A situation. So the Q is Elizabeth Alley saying, someone once suggested that you were your own best character. But from what you're saying, you totally refute that, I would think. And Janet frame responds, I think so. Obviously,

I'm writing the book, so it's all in me, but not necessarily so, because there are some surprising, I mean, factual characters about, even if one didn't invent any. For instance, I chose to come on the bus this morning, rather than a taxi, because I like to watch the people on the bus and hear the conversation, and it was much more rewarding time spent with nothing sticking to the surface. Whereas when I did arrive, I had all these little events that had happened in the half hour or 20 minutes on the bus. I don't mean I will sit down and write about them all. They are there, you see, and they will emerge when the time is ripe and fit into the pattern of things. And Elizabeth Alley responds, fitting into the pattern of things is quite important for you, isn't it? A lot of your characters seem to be quite concerned with fitting in.

You've cracked it, Doctor. You've gotten to the bottom of it right now. Janet frame responds, that's quite interesting. I don't mean fitting into the patterns of affairs, but the whole of writing is expressing an emerging pattern and shape. And the satisfaction of when the shape is concluded, although there is a frustration of knowing that it may not be right or something is a miss,

it's something that emerges. And this is for me, the real joy of writing. I mean, it's not publication or anything else It's just as one is writing a pattern grows and everything seems to fall into place. Very exciting very exciting just to see it Sure, I just I think that that turn that the interviewer does where she's like oh falling into a pattern you mean fitting in Yeah, you're an outsider, you mean? Yeah. Labatemy, you know, like, I wish she wasn't say Labatemy,

but there's just. There's an endocurrent Labatemy, and they're not, I got you. And you can tell the Janet frame is, like, she's very polite and... But she's not particularly engaging with that interpretation, either. No, and, or, nor is she calling her out, because that would be the other thing, is like, fuck you.

And both then, when you call them out, you look crazy, don't you? You know, so there's no winning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's so interesting to me because what she's talking about with fitting into a pattern is actually just a craft of writing. Yeah. She's talking about structure and formality and plotting. Oh, for sure.

I've told you, Joe, see, I don't know if I've ever, and just to be clear, with any writer and honestly any practitioner of any art, their experience of creating that art will look and feel so different and personal to them include up to and including the reasons why they do it, what they get out of it. Are they trying to communicate, are they trying to entertain, are they trying to make money? Like there's all of these things that enter into it. I've described it to Josie before I know I have, because I was talking about the Momo episode with you, and it was like, I really felt all the puzzle pieces just fall into place. It was like, and I just put it together. I put it together all so quick, and my head on the run,

like, I birthed that one so quick, and I'm still, that one structurally is a banger, folks. The Momo episode from a structural perspective, I killed that shit. So I don't know that I would describe it as like the identification of a pattern just because that's not the way that I conceptualize it, but I've certainly used puzzle metaphors

the falling into place of puzzle pieces. And that's not that dissimilar thought when you look at it, right? Right, yeah. Sure, you could peg thought patterns like that to like possibly being neurodivergent or something like that, but it could just as easily, like you say, the iterative craft of doing an art over and over, or anything over and over, making a lamp over and over, building a

house over and over. You come to be like, yeah, you come to be really familiar with the parts of it, the patterns of it. You just might not conceptualize it that way because your brain maybe works in more literal terms or works in, yeah, you think of it like a puzzler, you think of it like a scavenger hunter, you think of it like a building a watch

or whatever you think of it like, I don't know. Yeah. It reminds me, you know what it reminds me of too a little bit is and I can't believe she didn't come up early when we were talking about like artists being equated with their mental illness, but I remember watching a clip of Shanado Connor where she. Oh, yeah, how the fuck do we miss that? Where she was, I want to say I'm like Graham Norton and Graham Norton, the interviewer, and I apologize if it's not him, but in my mental replay of it, it's him. Says something like, how are you doing? Is like how he kind of starts the interview?

And she kind of takes exception to that. She's like, I'm like right now I'm fine. Like I don't, I feel like all of my interviews are kind of start that way. Are you well? Like are you are you mentally with us? You know what I mean, which is like kind of a yeah, like you say, probably a pretty frustrating thing to have to encounter repeatedly and have to like be polite about because you're selling a book and you're, you know, probably just you understand people's curiosity to a certain degree and you're just kind of tired of it. And you know, you know, I know I'm so surprised we didn't think of Shaneet O'Connor because she's very that. she's very like she's her her beautiful tortured mind she's very one of those. Yeah, and maybe

maybe our our misstep was that like Janet frame is so non-cabative. And so just like I'm not going to do any of that. And like, yeah, she seems very shelty. It was just like I'm going to like, I'm going to rip this picture of Poet, let's go, baby. Yeah. Yeah. But it was concerning to her enough

that her story kept getting swept up in this question of her being mad or not. And so part of her response to that in particular was she went out and in the 1980s she wrote three volumes of her autobiography. The first is called To the Island and it kind of follows her childhood. The next is an angel at my table which is adult, you know, adolescence into adulthood and the final one was the envoy from mere city. Okay.

So that one goes up to her return to do Zealand in 1963. So it's not her full life. It's this hotly contested era of life. It's the lobotomy. It's the like the post lobotomy. Like, oh, you were never schizophrenic. Sorry, boo. Right.

Right. All of that. And she kind of uncharacteristic for her meandering style and her very poetic language. It's still quite poetic to be fair, but it is much... It's straighter. I was gonna say it's probably more precise

because she knows that like, if, as it kind of sounds like, the purpose of this is at least somewhat to be, like, let me say this once so that I never have to say it again because I can just be like it's in the fucking book. Go read the book. Yeah. You use the tool that is appropriate for the job and probably a more straightforward style would be more appropriate for this particular job if clarification is the purpose. Yeah, it's a lot of biography that she writes in chronological order too, right? Which is not really characteristic of her style.

I filled my lagoon with the cup of time, none of that shit. No, we're going right in. Yeah. Well, I don't know. The first, like, little section is from the first place of liquid darkness within the second place of air and light. I sat down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories and truth and directions. This is the opposite.

This is the opposite of what we just talked about. My sense is that she's kind of warming herself up. This is how she knows, is how she likes to communicate. And now she's got to like, okay, first things first, then this, then this, then this, and this. I don't then this, then this. I don't know. It's interesting. So she writes these autobiographies, this trilogy, all through the 80s and in 1990, there's a film made of her life. Okay. It's called an angel at my table. Have you seen this movie? No. I guess not, because you don't know Janet Frank. Okay, so

my table. Have you seen this movie? I guess not because you don't know Janet Frank. Okay, so Jane Campion directs this film. Okay. Jane Campion is like Oscar fodder. I think she's if she's not the, is she an Oscar winner? She sounds like she sounds, I've definitely heard her mentioned in breasts with Oscar winners that she has in herself one and Oscar. Yeah, she's also a Kiwi woman. She was obviously fascinated by Janet Frank and then wanted to tell the story. Yeah, she's also a Kiwi woman. She was obviously fascinated by Janet Frey and then wanted to tell the story. She, you know the movie that she did that's maybe her most popular is the piano. Yes. Yes.

Yes, and Anna Pacquim. She does have an Academy Award for Screenplay. Oh, okay. She won Best Director for Power of the Dog in 2021. Oh, that's right. Those, these little weren't controversial. And those made people like that one. Nobody wins for the thing they're supposed to win for.

Kate Winslow should have won her Oscar for Heavenly Creatures, but it didn't happen. Ooh, hot take. Oh, the best people have lung diseases. Oh, yeah. Good stuff. Good little taste. Well, taste it.

I wish we filmed it. Well, taste a sample. So, film. Well, very tasty, simple. So Jane Campion, obviously kind of known in the North American Hollywood circles, this movie in Angel at my Table makes it so that Janet Freyme is more well known throughout the entire world. You know, the movie is wonderful. It's really good. It's beautifully shot.

It takes a lot from the autobiographies It's not everything because it's a film adaptation, of course But you know the stories is the lobotomy years like it is the story of Janet frames upbringing and issues and yeah all of it So it's kind of the strange feedback loop where Janet frame wrote the autobiographies in order to like dispel mistruths. But because that's the most exciting and compelling part of the thing, it's the part that narrativizes the best of film. It's of course what you would make the movie about. So there's lots of Americans or you know anybody around the rush,

she's like, oh, I love him. Jane can't be She's a very famous heavy. I've not read any of her. No, no, yeah. Right. Oh, what a catch 22. What a what a bummer. I know. Right. But you know, her writing career was studded from the beginning. You know, she started with this, this well-known prize in New Zealand. She goes on to win the Commonwealth Riders Prize in 1989 for her novel The Carpathians, which is like that's a big huge deal. Yeah. Ward in 1990, she is the 16th appointee to the Order of New Zealand, which is the nation's highest civil honor. Yeah, we do that. We have some more commonwealth, too, so I think we have some similar conventions up here.

And she has two honorary doctorates from New Zealand universities. She has membership to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There were rumors in two different rounds that she was gonna be selected as a Nobel Prize winner in literature that did not come to fruition. Her for your consideration moment it just never came through. I guess reporters were like, oh I saw her name on a list.

How many of those are there? How many fucking purple monkey dishwashers you think there are? Oh I saw fucking, you know, they're going for Stephanie Myers this year. They're going for Elon Musk this year. Purple monkey dish. It's like a joke from The Simpsons. I thought you were a fan. Oh, I Thought I was a mug with people. I was gonna have to explain my he really is. Well, then don't don't explain it I refuse Not interesting it's a joke from The Simpsons. I kind of just explained it Okay, yeah fair enough. And she's still kind of, even with all these accolades, she still kind of struggles

with this idea that people see her as this kind of mad, wild, mentally unstable, or just plain unhappy. And in fact, in an interview with New Zealand Women's Weekly that was published in 1985, she says to the interviewer to one of his questions, she's like, I do enjoy happiness. I'm a great lover of fun and laughter. I wish you all would believe me, please do. Oh no, you know what?

You dodge one lobotomy. You dodge one lobotomy and that's all anyone wants to talk about for the rest of time. Oh no. And here we are not helping. I'm sorry. I'm sorry Janet. I know right right. I in 2004 when Janet was 80 years old she was diagnosed with leukemia and she died in hospital and didn't need it. New Zealand, South Island. Before she passed away, she chose her executor who was her niece, a woman by the name of Pamela Gordon. They were very close growing up and Pamela knew a lot about her feelings and knew her whole work and knew a lot of the ins and outs.

So it made, it made sense to get her in that position. And I have to say Pamela Gordon runs a very tight ship with the Janet Frey and the state. It is a challenge to find any of her work free online. Got it. Not only is she kind of a copyrights, as she should be, you know. Don't say. Right, yeah. Love you Pamela.

Pamela, Pamela. Pamela. Pamela. De-bora. De-bora. Pamela, there we go. Pamela. There, yeah, yeah.

You're right, yeah, yeah. Everyone who's listening from New Zealand thanks for hanging in there. We really appreciate it. Yeah, you really are. You've been a match. You've been great. Great, great country.

Well done. Pamela also is not a fan of the Wikipedia entry for Janet break, which she writes about and the Janet frame blog that she maintains on the official Janet Frame website. She's also very kind of keeping in mind I'd say with Janet Frame's own trajectory. Pamela Gordon is pretty defensive about the mental health stuff when it comes to her and she said in an interview with the New Yorker Pamela Gordon did because she's working with all these entities who are publishing Janet Frame posthumously.

So she had an interview with Deborah Treesman, the fiction editor at New Yorker. She says, my major goal has been to try to bring the focus back into her work in the face of pressure to exploit her personal life. It is really interesting because, as I read from Janet Frame earlier, she was really not into the publishing at all. She was very

much into the writing. And so at her death, she had a huge backlog, like ginormous. And on her deathbed, she told Pamela, I have a book of poetry that's ready. Can you make sure that that is published? So that immediately went out after her death, but then also included on her desk were like piles of short stories, like all of these things to be edited. Interesting. And so Pamela Gordon has slowly

keeping to her major goal of bringing the focus back to the work has slowly but surely been publishing posthumously Janet frame short stories. Interesting. I don't believe there's been a full novel, but there's been these like smaller pieces. Sure. Sure. Interesting.

I think I'm not. Yeah. You can't fault someone for being particular about the way they carry out their loved ones legacy, especially when they seem to be relatively sincere about it. You hear stories of people being copyright hawks or being punitive with the way they use these copyrights or whatever, but it sounds like she just runs a very tight ship on this particular intellectual property because she wants it done a certain way, which fair enough. And I'll end on the note that now there is a famed and renowned literary prize in New Zealand named after Janet Frey.

Sweet, cool, that's a good legacy for her. I love that as a legacy considering that a literary prize is what saved her life. That should be the criterion for the lit-nope. This is what we're gonna do. And may I frame, frame award LLC, please listen. This is the point that I'd like you to listen to. This award needs to save someone's life every single year. That is how we give out the award. We find like, God, we find whatever horrible list they still have for lobotomies and we

just, no, you know what, as I describe, maybe maybe we just you cash prize in a dinner in a revolving restaurant instead Yeah, yeah, some good publicity just get it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah cool Yeah, that's the story of Janet frame my dude. Oh Jay frame. Jay frame. That's cool That she sounds that's an interesting person to get to know. Very in line with the type of person who I like to talk about on this podcast because like you say, it's almost like you need to learn two truths about someone like this. You need to learn like the lobotomy truth and then you need to learn like the actual truth that isn't just the media that's hyper focused on this one. Very legitimately, very interesting and compelling

and easy to narrative-ized point of her story, but no one person is a lobotomy that they didn't get. As we always say on the show. Yeah, yeah, that's come up a lot. Yeah, a few times. No, but like the feral, right? It's just like nobody is one specific thing that they did to. nobody is one specific aspect of

Their personality nobody is one specific nobody is their mental illness Nobody is Nobody is their series of mental illnesses nobody is entirely their physical disability or their sexuality or their Their race or their traumas or their circumstances, right? Like we're all just, we're all just a whole bunch of different bubbling things and often constantly bubbling. Constantinially improving and improving and iterating and backsliding and all of these things and public personas don't always encapsulate that. I guess that's kind of apt to watch how she kind of felt about the entire idea of needing to be like a public person though. She didn't seem mad at Jett and I don't,

I don't think I would be either. I think part of her dislike of it is that it's like it's not good writing. It's not a good way to understand people. You know what I mean? Like she had such a passion for studying people and she was just be like, why would you just see somebody and then they're just this one thing? Yeah. Like, that's what's beautiful about people. That's what's beautiful about characters and about like putting people on paper. And yeah, there's something. It's so true. It's so true. Janet Frame just reminds me a lot of the heavenly creatures to, like, not obviously no murder,

but like. Moe to mother. Yeah. There's like something really crazy about like the way that mental health and imagination are like, spun out. Yeah, I don't know. No, for sure.

For sure. Maybe I was watching heavenly creatures like with this my mind. No, the parallels are definitely that. This is about a young woman who is institutionalized in New Zealand. Yeah. Around the same era give or take 10 years.

Yeah. That heavily creatures took place. There's like, there's again that veneer of being an outsider of being misunderstood of like, what is madness and what just is being queer or being neurodivergent or being somewhat eccentric in your interpersonal presentation or being intensely introverted, God forbid. Like, you know, there was, I think there was probably a lot of misunderstanding in society about things that were different tonight.

You know, obviously there still is, but in a lot of ways I'm really grateful that I live in a time where like, not'm not at risk of being with Automized. Yeah. It makes me happy. It makes me happy. It makes me happy. It makes me go a rebel smooth. Oh sure does. Oh it sure does. Yeah. Oh it sure does.

Thanks for listening. If you want more infamy, we've got plenty more episodes at www.thittersweetinfamy.com. Or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our coffee account. At KO-F-I-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D com forward slash bittersweet and three. But no pressure. Bittersweet and thmeese free baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review following us on Instagram at bittersweetinthme.me or just past podcasts long to a friend you think would do it. Stay sweet. The sources that I used for this episode included a rare radio interview, transcribed and

published in Leigham Fall 178, volume 45, published June 1991, and it was between Janet Frame and Elizabeth Alley. I also listened to an ABC radio program, that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation entitled Janet Frane and the Margin. It was written and produced by Anna DeGiafari published November 27, 2010. I read an article in the New Yorker called This Week Infection, Pamela Gordon on Janet Frane and it was published March 26, 2010. I looked at various entries in an angel at my blog, which is the blog maintained by Pamela Gordon on the Janet Frame official website.

I read In Search of Janet Frame from the Guardian written by Jane Campion, January 19, 2008, and Obert also in the Guardian of Janet Frame written by Michael King published January 30, 2004. I read an excerpt from Janet Frames' first volume of her autobiography to the island, which was published in 1982 by Pizziler, New York. I read an excerpt from her first novel, Owls Do Cry, published 1957 by Pegasus Press. I read an excerpt from the Lagoon and other short stories

in particular, The Story The Lagoon, published 1951 by Caxden Press Christchurch. I read an article Brief Encounter with Janet Frame by Graham Sidney, published in the magazine Now to Love June 15th, 2015. I also read Janet Frames-Pawn Reign on the roof in her collection of poetry The Pocket Mirror, published in 1967 by Braziller, New York. The video that we referenced in the episode Beeched Whale was posted to you to by user Beeched as and it was posted April 14, 2008. As always, we want to give a shout out to our monthly subscribers, First John the Mountain. Thank you so much for all you do and in a new addition to the group, we've got Erica, Joe Brown. Thank you so much both of you for tibbing a little change our way every month. And if you two are interested in some

bittersweet exclusives, you too can become a monthly subscriber and get access to those. This includes the bittersweet film club, so please go ahead and hop over to our coffee account. That's k-o-fi.com slash bittersweetinthom. BittersweetInthom is a proud member of 604 Podcast Network. The interstitial music you heard earlier is written by Mitchell Collins and the song you're listening to now is Tees Street by Brian Steele.