As a writer, Janet Frame branches out beyond New Zealand in Envoy from Mirror City. Personally, she finds her womanhood. I considered this reading timely because of the focus Frame gave to mental illness. (I was reading this before and after the suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.) I found it interesting that Frame got herself checked into a psychiatric facility so she could learn "the truth" about her illness and was somewhat disappointed to learn she was not considered schizophrenic. She had been using her illness as a shield against normalcy and everyday life. It was if naivete was catching up with her and she had to learn the coming of age ways of adulthood. ( )

The final volume of Janet Frame's autobiography sees her leaving New Zealand for Europe, where she hopes to focus on her writing. This is the 1950s, and she begins in London, then moves on to Ibiza and Andorra.
She has adventures; she embarks on relationships - and her earlier diagnosis of schizophrenia is finally refuted by London doctors, a fact which she initially finds hard to face up to, having lived with the alleged condition as an excuse for any deficiencies in herself.

Now too she starts to see success with her writing; I found this volume the most literary of the trilogy, as Frame considers her craft:

"Within every event lay a reflection reached only through the imagination and its various servant languages, as if, like the shadows in Plato's cave, our lives and the world contain mirror cities revealed to us by our imagination, the Envoy." ( )