Volume one covers those years of her childhood, before the hospitals she revives memories from her earliest years which she believes have been affected and disturbed by E.S.T. Frame writes frequently that she believes her memory to have been affected by the electric shock treatments she received, and I think this helps - in part - to explain the difficulty of reading volume one. In volume two Frame "relaxes" - she has dropped the defensive stance of volume one. This was so much easier and much more interesting to read than volume one - and I think I can indicate why.
She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.
The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented.
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