The second volume of Frame's autobiography, An Angel at My Table covers her life at university and her subsequent hospitalisation, for the better part of a decade, for schizophrenia. I should say suspected schizophrenia, for she never actually had it. In some ways for me this autobiography suffers a little for skating over what Frame went through in Seacliff mental hospital. I don't mean that I particularly want to read misery porn, but Frame herself mentions here that she'd already written extensively about this time of her life in her book Faces in the Water (which I haven't read but now want to). It's understandable that she doesn't want to have to cover the same ground twice, or in the same way, but her misdiagnosis and hospital stay is the central event of this volume of her autobiography, with reverberations from it spreading through the whole of her life. I can't help but think that the relief that Frank Sargeson gave her by providing a safe place to work and recover and write would have stood out all the more in the text if the worst parts of Frame's twenties hadn't been glossed over so much.