SOURCE: "'An Honest Record': An Interview with Janet Frame," in Landfall, Vol. 45, No. 2, June, 1991, pp. 154-68.

In the interview with Alley below, Frame discusses her thoughts on the genres of autobiography and fiction as well as on the act of writing.

What follows is made out of two separate interviews recorded for Radio New Zealand by Elizabeth Alley and broadcast on the Concert Programme. The first was recorded at Wanganui in April 1983. The second was recorded in 1988 when Elizabeth Alley visited Janet Frame at her home, this time near the small North Island town of Shannon, in a valley of rich grasslands fringed by the jagged range of the Tararuas. This is the mountain range that became the Carpathians of her eleventh novel, and her first long fiction since she completed the three volumes of autobiography.

Janet Frame does not enjoy interviews. Nevertheless, at Wanganui and five years...