From sturdy New Zealand schoolgirl to internationally acclaimed author via a mistaken diagnosis of schizophrenia: if Janet Frame's story - also touched on in Michael King's biography reviewed on Page 13 - were couched as fiction, it would be laughed out of court. But the three slim volumes which constitute An Angel At My Table - filmed sympathetically, and hugely successfully, by Jane Campion - are to be filed under "autobiography", and the book has been hailed, by biographer extraordinaire Michael Holroyd, no less, as "one of the greatest autobiographies written this century". It is certainly searingly honest. Frame has no qualms about allowing herself to come across as a monster - an astute and often amusing observer of the human condition, to be sure; a sensitive soul with an almost physical affinity for poetry and fiction, undoubtedly; but at the same time, somebody one is glad to be reading about rather than living with. Her voyages to England, Ibiza and Andorra come across as shipwrecks littered with the bleached bones of skeletons, mainly male, which have been sucked dry: the innocent smuggler El Mario Vici, who regarded himself as her intended, and who may still be awaiting a reply to his pathetic "loving postcard"; jolly American Bernard, whose crime was to be terrified by the prospect of progeny from a summer romance; fussy, misguided Patrick Reilly, who fed her through a dismal London winter only to be discarded come spring, like a puppy at Easter, in a single chilling sentence: "I shook myself free of Patrick". Jawdropping stuff.