 Following on low, Janet Frayne writes about painful events, mental illness, incarceration, and the shifting eye of cultural identity and expectations and expectations of normality exact from women, particularly from those women who resist or refuse those expectations. Barbara Kligerman is going to read from Frayne's and Angel at my table. I think I'm going to need this. OK, we pick up Janet Frayne's story. Is it on? Yes. Janet Frayne's story at the end of a three week medical leave from her probationary teaching year. At the end of my third week, when school again will be for me, I was forced to realize that suicide was my only escape. I had moved it so carefully with such close texture my visible layer of no trouble at all, a quiet student, always ready with a smile if decayed teeth could be hidden, always happy that even I could not break the thread of the material of my deceit. I felt completely isolated. I knew no one to confide in, to get advice from, and there was nowhere I could go. What in the whole of the world could I do to earn my living and still live as myself as I knew myself to be? Temporary masks I knew had their place. Everyone was wearing them. They were the human range, but not mass amended in place until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually suffocated. On Saturday evening, I tied in my room, arranged my possessions, and swallowing a packet of aspirins. I laid down and meant to die, certain that I would die. My desperation was extreme. Next morning, the drink Monday, I looked without me a slight headache. It happened that part of our psychology course was the writing of a condensed autobiography. When I finished writing mine, I wondered whether I should mention my attempt at suicide. I had now recovered in a way. I was rather proud, for I could not understand how I had been so daring. I wrote at the end of my autobiography. Perhaps I should mention a recent attempt at suicide, describing what I had done. At the end of class that week, my teacher John Forrest said to me, I enjoyed your autobiography. All the others were so formal and serious, but yours was so natural. You have a talent for writing. I smile within myself in a superior fashion. Talent for writing, indeed. Writing was going to be my profession. John Forrest looked at me closely. You must have had troubles swallowing all those aspiros. Oh, I drank them with water, I replied calmly. That evening, as I was preparing to go to bed, my landlady, answering the knock on the door, called to me. There were three men to see you from the university. I went to door of the door, and there was Mr. Forrest, Mr. Prince, and the head of the department who spoke first. Mr. Forrest tells me you haven't been feeling very well. We thought you might like to have a little rest. I'm fine, thank you. No trouble, no trouble at all. We thought you might like to come with us down to the hospital, to the Dunedin hospital, just for a few days rest. So I visited Dunedin Hospital to call you more. Which I soon was shocked to find was the psychiatric ward. And after my three weeks in hospital for observation, mother was asked to travel to Dunedin to take me home. And after holiday home, I'd be as good as new, they said. They suddenly, from the prospect of going home, I felt all the worries of the world returning, all the sadness of home, and the everlasting toil of my parents, and the arguments at home, and my mother's eternal peacemaker intervention, and my decaying teeth, and my inability to cry. In my state of alarm about my future, when I saw my mother standing there at the entrance to the ward, with a hint of fear and her eyes ran to all like a vigilant, mental ward. And her face transparently trying to adopt the expression, all this while, I knew that home is the last place I wanted to be. I screamed at mother to go away. She laughed at me, complimented me, but she says she's a happy person. She's always been a happy person. I did not realize that the alternative to going home was committal to the psychiatric hospital, Zecliff. No one asked me, no one thought to ask me why I had screamed at my mother. No one asked me what my plans were for the future. I became an instant third person, or even personless, as in the official note this made by my mother, about my mother's visit, reported to me years later, refused to leave hospital. I was taken third person people are also thrusted to the passive, to Zecliff. The six weeks I spent at Zecliff Hospital in a world I've never known, among people whose existences I never thought possible became for me a concentrated course in the horrors of insanity and the dwelling place of those judged insane, separating me forever from the formal acceptable realities and assurance, assurances of everyday life. For my first moment there, I knew I could not turn back to my usual life or forget what I saw at Zecliff. I felt as if my life was overturned by the sudden division of people into ordinary people in the street and these secret people whom few had seen nor talked to but whom many spoke of with derision, laughter, fear. When I left Zecliff in December 1945 for a six month probationary period, I felt that I carried within me a momentous change brought about by my experience of being in a mental hospital. I noticed that the behavior of my family had changed in subtle ways related to my having been a patient at Zecliff where the loonies lived and the wilderness, the medical certificate stated nature of illness, schizophrenia. It seemed to spell my doom as if I had emerged from a chrysalis, the natural human state, into another kind of creature and even if there were parts of me that were familiar to human beings, my gradual deterioration would lead me further and further away and even in the end, not even my family would know me. I knew I was shy, inclined to be fearful and even more so after my six weeks of being in hospital and seeing what I had seen around me that I was absorbed in the world of imagination but I also knew that I was totally present in the real world and whatever shadow lay over me, lay only in the writing of the medical certificate. I was taking my new status seriously. If the world of the mad little world was the world where I now officially belonged, lifelong disease, no cure, no hope, then I would use it to survive. I would excel in it. I sensed that it did not exclude my being a poet. I have to add this because no one, I, including myself, knew Jan Fran until I started reading her. When she was again a patient in C-Cliff in 1952, her first book was published and won New Zealand's only literary award just in time for it prompted the head of that psychiatric hospital to cancel a scheduled lobotomy. And after over eight years in and out of mental institutions, she was found not to be and never had been schizophrenic. All together she wrote four collections of stories, 12 novels and a three-volume autobiography winning many prizes all over the world, as well as in her native New Zealand. She died in 2004 at the age of 79.