However, she later suggested that her autobiography, An Angel at my Table, was partly written to convince everyone that, after all 'my fiction is genuine fiction. And I do invent things'. Frame's definition of autobiography as 'fact', versus fiction as 'invented', is a definition King respects, yet it does not hold the reader. Frame's world beyond this world, her moment of creative rapture, appears to be a point of trance-like introspection. Yet personal allusions are rendered obscure in Frame's fiction by an intensely metaphorical style.
Analogies are laden on to analogies, developing into riots of hyper-meaning.
Houses rock 'like a sea', blame rests on individuals 'like a butterfly on a leaf'. One metaphor twirls the paragraph away, into the skewed world of its particular nature, and then is hotly pursued by another, demanding another reality twist. In his respectful account, King argues that Frame's strangeness of perception was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. Her doctors, intercepting letters in which she described gorse smelling like peanut butter, discerned not the artist 'making it new', but the 'disordered mind' confusing a spiky bush with an edible nutty paste. Other psychiatrists, more literary of bent, diagnosed her as a schizophrenic in the manner of 'Van Gogh, of Hugo Wolf'.