No doubt like many people, when I first watched Jane Campion’s 1990 film An Angel at My Table, some ten years ago, I intended to read Janet Frame’s three-part autobiography – To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City – on which the film is based, and anything else of hers I could get my hands on.

The books cover, respectively, Frame’s childhood and teenage years; then her twenties, much of which she spent in psychiatric hospitals misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and receiving over 200 doses of ‘unmodified ECT, each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution’ and only escaping a leucotomy after winning the Hubert Church Memorial Award for her first published book, The Lagoon and Other Stories; and lastly, the years she then spent, originally on a literary grant intended to ‘broaden her experience’, in Europe. At one point while in hospital, Frame looks at the notepad of another patient who is writing a ‘book’. The page is covered with zeroes. Frame, never terribly confident, is terrified that her writing amounts to little more, that the desire to write has little to do with ability.

But no doubt also like many people, after seeing the film I didn’t read her autobiography, at least not for a very long time. When I finally did, I did so along with two excellent collections of Frame’s stories, Between My Father and the King: New and Uncollected Stories and The Daylight and the Dust: Selected Short Stories. At times, with her sense for detail, she brings to mind short-story writers of her time, such as Mavis Gallant, with whom she shares a perpetual sense of out-of-placeness. But with her at once ugly and charming self-reflexivity as well as hyper-sensitivity – or, perhaps, empathetic discomfort – for those around her, Frame also has much in common with contemporary quasi-autobiographical writers, such as Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Frame’s stories, in particular, have an incredible economy. In ‘The Linesman’, which is a little over a page in length – originally published in The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (‘The Reservoir’ and ‘Prizes’ from the same collection are two of her best stories) and more recently published in The Daylight and the Dust – Frame uses the perspective of a narrator looking out a window along with the viewpoint that the narrator imputes to a linesman up a telegraph pole to present the complex mechanics of the neighbourhood, and the narrator’s own troubles. This use of multiple perspectives, which often cloud and interfere with the clarity of one another, appears again and again in her best writing. In this story, we see (though it is probably the linesman who actually does) youths ‘lying in attitudes of surrender beneath the dismantled bellies of scooters’, and women ‘sweeping the Saturday night refuse from their share of the pavement’. And then we learn of the narrator’s ‘marauding despair’, and that she wishes the man would fall. Frame creates beauty, and then uses that beauty to produce menace. It’s also fascinating to see the way she reworks much of the same material in her fiction and her autobiography, with the different possibilities of each, adding depth and complication.

But her economy is not a simple or direct one, and is often created with long, tightly bound sentences that leave us where we didn’t expect to be left. Sentences that are stories within stories, sending surges through the texts around them. In The Envoy from Mirror City, Frame is on her way to Andorra, having had her first love affair with a mediocre American poet who disappeared without a word shortly after they had unprotected sex in Ibiza and: ‘the stark black of the northern trees against the snow seemed to be part of the natural regression from the southern spring to the northern winter and in tune with the mood of inescapable present that sooner or later besets a woman of thirty-two who is alone and may be pregnant’. Frame attempts to miscarry using a childhood friend’s folk knowledge: gin, quinine and rushing up mountains.

Many of the chapters in Frame’s autobiography are essentially tight short stories in their own right, one of the best being ‘The Birds of the Air’ from To the Is-Land. Janet’s maternal grandmother, Grandma Godfrey, is coming to stay with the family. For years, their mother has told the children, a block of we, how much they will love Grandma Godfrey, that she will be ‘like a sister’ to them. As soon as she arrives, however, she starts complaining about the ways the children disabuse their mother. To the children she is a stranger, and yet ‘behaved towards Mum as if she owned her’, even though everyone knows that their mother belongs to them alone. ‘The saddest fact was that Mum appeared to agree with Grandma Godfrey.’ The grandmother soon leaves and when she does, Frame is left with more evidence that what her parents say isn’t always true, and sometimes her parents don’t even believe the things they say themselves. Truth and the slipperiness of words is the constant problem of her childhood.

The second book, An Angel at My Table, is incredible for many reasons, but particularly for its insight into the consciousness of someone suffering within the inhumane locked jaw of the psychiatric care facilities in New Zealand at the time, how mean and basic they were. But it’s the first and third books where we see Frame developing first as a person and then as a writer, where she is learning how to live within that complicated, choppy relationship between oneself, other people, the world and words. And she loves words: gored, rushed (rushed to the hospital), skirting board, though she frets that she is neither imaginative enough – Frame suffers from being too practically and factually minded – nor that she has experienced true personal tragedy, at least not the right kind. Shirley, a girl in her class, not only plays the piano and sings but also has the most enviable thing of all: a dead father. By this time, Frame’s eldest sister Myrtle is already dead, drowned at the local swimming pool, but, ‘Somehow, Myrtle’s death did not really “qualify”.’ It is too much a part of her. The inappropriateness of this being used as subject matter, and her pained unwillingness, is, of course, the story.

Re-watching the film now, as gorgeously staged and shot as it is, you could almost feel sorry for the limitations faced by the director. In the translation to film, Campion has been largely denied the most powerful element of Frame’s writing: her internal world. All the same, it’s a pleasure to watch as a reminder of all the incredible, perceptive writing beneath, which is a long way from zeroes.

Oliver Driscoll is a Melbourne short-story writer. He reads fiction submissions for Overland and is a co-founder of the Slow Canoe Readings.