Audrey Wollen at The New Yorker:
“The Edge of the Alphabet” is the third in a sequence of novels published after Frame left the hospital, following “Owls Do Cry,” in 1957, and “Faces in the Water,” in 1961. The novels’ deep-sea dive into her experience, the years of institutionalization, of forcible detachment from the social world, of being written off, made disposable—until she was suddenly holding the pen, writing, writing, writing. They haunt the alleys of the autobiographical, but never fully step onto the recognized thoroughfares of memoir, or even autofiction. Despite clear reference to the events of her life, the novels remain shadowy and irreverent, winding behind the normative façades of storytelling.
The loose trilogy begins with something like the truth, but molded by a stark counterfactual: in “Owls Do Cry,” for example, the protagonist, Daphne, undergoes the lobotomy that Frame herself narrowly avoided. The Withers family, presented first in “Owls Do Cry” and then picked up again in “The Edge of the Alphabet,” refracts Frame and her siblings: Daphne, locked up and deemed insane; her sisters, Chicks and Francie (who dies by falling into the fire pit at their local dump); and her brother, Toby, who struggles with epilepsy, are versions of Frame; her sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who each accidentally died by drowning, years apart; her surviving sister, June, and her brother, George, who was epileptic.
more here.
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