The Lagoon and Other Stories

"A word about Janet Frame—she was famously hospitalized, and they were going to give her a lobotomy, which was the way they treated those psychiatric issues in the 1950s. One of the doctors happened to hear that she was a writer [and had been awarded a prestigious literary prize], and he said, “I cannot lobotomize this woman.” Janet Frame eventually became New Zealand’s most prominent writer. The connection between madness and writing in her work is very interesting. She writes as if trying to dig something clear of obscurity, or cut through an emotion to see what lies underneath. There’s a sense of anticipation, of waiting, whenever she writes a paragraph, to discover what’s going to happen in the next paragraph. The excitement of listening to Janet Frame tell you a story is the opposite of what writing workshops teach you about writing as a craft—this idea that you should be in control, you should be able to explain yourself, you should choose the best formulated sentence. When I read a story like that, my first feeling is that the writer trusts me. I once did an event with a writer who said that for him, the relationship between the writer and the reader is the relationship of a couple in a BDSM relationship. He said, “As a writer, I control the reader. I scare them and then I let them go.” My love for writing comes from exactly the opposite thing. I don’t want a wonderful puppet master of a writer to put me in a rat maze. I want to feel that we’re crushed together, we’re laughing together, we’re doing something together. I think writers like Janet Frame really give you that feeling."