"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination"
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Frame swats away the cute myth of the novelist as a tourist in fantasy, popping over a border for souvenirs and calling it art. The “shopping expedition” image is deliberately deflating: it captures the consumer version of imagination, where invention is quick, optional, and essentially decorative. By rejecting it, she’s also rejecting the market’s preferred story about creativity as effortless flair - a story that sells books and author personas but trivializes the work.
Her counter-metaphor is pointedly industrial and civic. “Factories” gives you repetition, strain, craft learned by doing; it suggests production without glamour, the kind that leaves marks on the body. “Streets” adds exposure and contingency: the messy traffic of other people, danger, accident, noise - the novelist not sealed off in a tower but moving through a public world. Then “cathedrals” raises the stakes without slipping into piety. A cathedral is built over generations; it’s labor plus structure plus an aspiration to meaning that outlasts the builder. Frame’s imagination is not a private playground but a whole society of work sites, with different kinds of pressure.
Context matters: Frame’s life was shadowed by institutionalization and misrecognition, and her writing often treats “unreality” as something society imposes, not something the writer escapes into. The “unreal land” line reads like a critique of how outsiders label the imaginative mind as escapist or suspect. Her intent is both defense and dare: the novel is not a trip; it’s a long-term occupation.
Her counter-metaphor is pointedly industrial and civic. “Factories” gives you repetition, strain, craft learned by doing; it suggests production without glamour, the kind that leaves marks on the body. “Streets” adds exposure and contingency: the messy traffic of other people, danger, accident, noise - the novelist not sealed off in a tower but moving through a public world. Then “cathedrals” raises the stakes without slipping into piety. A cathedral is built over generations; it’s labor plus structure plus an aspiration to meaning that outlasts the builder. Frame’s imagination is not a private playground but a whole society of work sites, with different kinds of pressure.
Context matters: Frame’s life was shadowed by institutionalization and misrecognition, and her writing often treats “unreality” as something society imposes, not something the writer escapes into. The “unreal land” line reads like a critique of how outsiders label the imaginative mind as escapist or suspect. Her intent is both defense and dare: the novel is not a trip; it’s a long-term occupation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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