When the New Zealand writer Janet Frame was 7, she found in her school reader an adventure story, To the Is-Land, that she read as To the Is-land. Though corrected by her teacher, she accepted the word thereafter as meaning what it said, the Land of Is, not the Was-Land, not the Future. In [To the Is-Land, the] first volume of her autobiography, which she calls "a selection of views of the Is-Land," it is the place of her childhood and adolescence.

Naturally, one question a writer faces in embarking upon a prolonged journey through his own life is whether there is adventure or philosophy enough in his earliest years to fill a book—a problem charmingly illustrated by Richard Steele when he reported in The Tatler the salient facts of his infancy: "I was bred by hand, and ate nothing but milk till I was a twelve-month old: from which time I was observed to delight in pudding and potatoes." Janet Frame, the author of 10 highly regarded novels and a volume of poetry, knows how to avoid the pitfalls of memory and keep her tale eventful. While she notes that, when young, she drank "mook," sang "God Save Our Gracious Tin" thinking she sang about a kerosene tin, called a bird a birdie and her baby sister "Iddabull" instead of Isabel, she is, it seems, reminiscing for the right person, as if to herself and for herself, as if carefully following a map of childhood to discover where it went.

It went from Dunedin, where she was born in 1924, to the small town of Oamaru on the coast of South Island. Her father, George, was a railway engineer who played the bagpipes. Her mother, Lottie, a former housemaid in Katherine Mansfield's home in Wellington, was a woman of wisdom and character who wrote poems, sold them from door to door during the Depression and became the local poet. Like Colette's mother, Sido, she made valid each flower or blade of grass she and her children passed, filling them with mystery. Like Sido she would cry "Look! Look!" commanding the children, five in all, to heed the magical world around them. But she spoke also in an "earthquake-and-lightning" voice to deal with disasters when they punctually occurred.

Janet's red hair was a frizzy tangle that grew straight up from her head: She had dimples, freckles, shabby clothes that affirmed the family's poverty, and she had "tics and terrors." To her teachers she was from the start different, a word she soon translated into peculiar or a little mad. Quite early she learned the deceit of words—permanent waves were not permanent, "True Stories" were not true, a shop called "The Self Help" didn't mean she could help herself to the merchandise. Words were part of the bewildering contradictions of life, since they were her joy as a source of truth, at least in books, the very essence of the poetry she loved. But on her fifth birthday, when she started school, she lifted fourpence and a farthing from her father's pocket and treated the children in her class to chewing gum. Both at home, where her father took the strap to her, and at school she was labeled Thief, a word to her unfair and untrue. She found a friend, Poppy, who taught her the names of things and lent her Grimm's Fairy Tales, but by imparting information about sex gave her forbidden words that she was punished by Dad for even knowing.

It is a wistful tale, honestly and believably told, of the puzzling encounters of childhood, the recognitions, the gain and the loss. In spite of their quarrels and Dad's thrashings, her family was a closely knit one from which gradually Janet grew apart, angered by her mother's unfathomable peacefulness and habit of waiting on others, of loving God and poetry. Her brother, Bruddie, whose epilepsy brought on episodes of violent rage increased by his father's mockery, sought escape in alcohol. One afternoon when Janet was 13, her older sister, Myrtle, a strong swimmer, was discovered drowned in the Oamaru Public Baths. Dad had been hardest on Myrtle, who wanted to be a film star, who was rebellious, daring, openly disobedient. At the news of her death, Miss Frame writes, "At first I was glad, thinking there'd be no more quarrels, crying, thrashings, with Dad trying to control her and angry with her and us listening frightened, pitying, and crying, too." Then came the realization of Myrtle's entire removal from the face of the earth. She had vanished, unreturning.

The last year of high school, in the Upper Sixth, was "a cruel year, the cruelest I had known." Still clad in her torn and patched school tunic, still without close girlfriends or any boyfriends, she sometimes felt a desolation she had no words for. "I'm going to be a poet," she wrote in her diary, but that summer she burned all her diaries and notebooks of poems. The story ends with a lonely, troubled girl traveling "south on the Sunday slow train to Dunedin and my Future"—to a new Is-land, the Dunedin Teachers' College, where she would prepare to become the teacher she didn't want to be. And one closes the book aware that if one is to know Janet Frame better, hear the rest of it, one must consent to follow her on her journey to as many Is-Lands as there are. Yet this vivid first volume is in a real sense complete, satisfying not merely as Chapter One but as an account of the making of a writer from the beginning possessed by words.