Customer Reviews

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

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The Art of Self-Exposure

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) showed the best of herself in letters. To quote Donald Hall she was a `soul-flasher.' She was passionately engaged in living and tormented into dying. Her flight through life was one of breathtaking bravery in the face of crippling odds. The letters date from 1944 when she was sixteen, through 1974 a few days before her death. Full credit should go to the editors, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of Ann, and Lois Ames, Ann's closest friend. The commentary is sensitive, knowledgeable and readable. The necessary biographical linkage is there.

There have always been unfortunate attempts to link Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Their similarities are their age, their sex, their birthplace in the Northeastern United States, and their self-inflicted deaths. And there the similarity ends. Ann was a fragile child who emerged a tormented woman. She was creatively brilliant in a very natural sense; yet she worked feverishly all her life to improve every word she wrote. She once said, "I am tearing at the stars." Ann enjoyed a large circle of devoted friends and repaid their devotion in kind. She was supportive and free with advice to younger struggling poets when she could barely survive her own despair. Ann was a naturally beautiful woman who seemed completely unaware or disinterested in her own breathtaking countenance.

I am astounded at how helpless she became at the end of her life. I truly do not comprehend how her friends and family could bear her onslaughts of misery and self-paralysis. They must have loved her very much. These letters are appealing and a pleasure to read. She was a wordsmith as well as an incredible poet. Following is a stanza from "All My Pretty Ones"

Never loving ourselves,

hating even our shoes and our hats,

we love each other, precious, precious.

Our hands are light blue and gentle.

Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.

But when we marry, the children leave in disgust.

There is too much food, and no one left over

to eat up all the weird abundance.

I love reading other people's letters. It's a little like catching them undressing! ... Making one feel a little naughty for watching.
Ann's letters are quite revealing, refreshing, honest, as if she is talking to you directly. The misspelled words and puntuation errors just add to the honesty of the words...especially in the beginning of the book. The way Anne jumps from here to there... the same way a person's thoughts or ideas would. Anne writes her letters like this!

Can you believe Anne Sexton got a C in Engish class w/ little effort? Just goes to show you, the genius many of us may hold inside. But throughout the letters, Anne continually second guesses herself, continually craves validity about her writing..."Is this any good?"

She and Sylvia Plath have much in common and discuss their suicide attempts as if it is a common thing to discuss. "How many times have you tried to kill yourself?" Sounds like a poet to me!

I so wanted Anne to be happy, to feel satisfyed, to be content with her MANY accomplishments, but the mental illness would not allow her this luxury.

Anne wrote letters to many people and made them fall in love with her..."I love you." she told many of them. "I don't know what I would do without you." She even wrote beautiful letters to a monk who was, after a while, willing to leave his Monk-hood. "Oh no!" Anne wrote back. "This love affair can only be in letters!" Yes, what a perfect distance, Anne.

One fan wrote about his love for Anne and her poetry. "I am only a housewife!" She wrote back. Did she really see herself this way? Oh, Anne!

Anne said..."Poetry is the opposite of Suicide."
WOW!
And when she finally stopped writing it, she killed herself once again. This time for real.

I give Anne's letters five stars, but the book as a whole four stars because of the lack of Anne's poetry, which should have been available for the reader throughout the book.

I loooove Anne Sexton!!!!!! put this review under Siammuse!!!!!

When I first began exploring poetry as a pre-teen, trying to go beyond the rhyming and beyond the few things we see in our burst toward "Education," I ran across the works of Anne Sexton and immediately fell in love with them. They were hopeful and hopeless all at once, loving and filled with dismay sometimes on the same page. As I learned more about the author from a scattering of books, I saw how much of herself she put into her writing because she was tormented in so many ways, too, and that this wasn't a love of writing that powered her onward. It was the need to let things go so she could continue living - in a very real physical sense. The failures on the marital front, the challenges that she found in motherhood, the way she found herself struggling with something that culminated with her writing at the start and breaking at the end - it was all there and I really didn't understand that until I read books like A Self-Portrait in Letters. That's possibly one of the things I liked about her more than most poets as well - Anne Sexton was really struggling when she found herself and the painful Muse she used to write. If followed through, you can see the desperation in the motif of work she constructed, and you can see where she feel too far to be salvaged and ultimately ended her life in October of 1974.

This book isn't a book of poems and doesn't contain anything like that at all inside. It is instead an intimate glimpse of her as she wrote fellow writers and people she loved, trying to figure out everything besides the pen. It shows how she felt about writing sometimes and how she felt about losing sometimes and, ultimately, it showed how she felt about the divorce that would consume her life and the years off she found and the things that drove her to kill herself.

While you can bear witness to this vicariously in her poetry, you can definitely tell that there is something far more driven when looking into her words that she wrote in a montage of letters. More sadly still, you can see her as she struggles to find a way that she will not ever obtain, and you can see the mental illness that silenced one of the most powerful voices poetry has really ever known.

If you are a fan of Anne Sexton and would like to see something on her life from her point-of-view, then this is a good book to look into. It IS NOT a good book for someone looking into the works of Sexton because none of that is there ,and I'm not really sure I would recommend it to anyone other than those interested in what really ailed the writer. I found it fascinating to see her private letters and to delve into her life, because I wondered what had taken her from feeling as if she could function to walking away from everything in the prime of her written moments. Still, this is more exploration into a person that anything else, It is trying to understand, too, because understanding is the key to so many a door not opened simply by the quill.

I give this book four stars because I honestly do not like Anne Sexton as a person - or as a poet really. I was very curious about her so I read Anne Sexton: A Biography and found that I didn't care for her as a person. I then read Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton and found that I really disliked her (it could be I'm biased because my own mother was mentally ill ...). So ... having said this, why did I feel the need to read her letters?? I LOVE reading women's letters. I suppose I was hoping I might like her after all after having read her correspondence to people she cared about. I was wrong.

I found it annoying that she stumbled upon poetry and suddenly she knows what it's like to be a poet. In her earlier letters, she is constantly apologizing for the incoherentness of her manic letters - and finally ends the letter a page and a half later. It's interesting that she felt harassed by so many people sending her poems and asking for her input and critiques/criticisms and yet throughout her life, she was constantly sending her poems to others asking for their feedback.

What I really appreciated about these letters is that there really is no need to have read a biography on Anne Sexton in order to enjoy them; it would definitely help, but the editors did such a thorough job in the editing process that they were kind enough to fill in gaps between letters, even going so far as to explain who Anne was responding to and why.

While I didn't enjoy these as much as other letters, they are unique and obviously they are appreciated by many people. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend this book to many people, but I wouldn't exactly try to keep anyone from reading it either.

These letters are written with the same exuberance and passion that distinguish Sexton's poetry. She is a person of extraordinarily strong expression. At times this can be tiring, especially when it involves flattering or over- praising fellow writers. But most of the time it is strong and convincing, especially when it tells the drama of her daily struggle to somehow hold on to her sanity and create her poetry. Poetry is she makes clear her life- raft and place of refuge. But the letters also reveal involvement in family life and struggle with its responsibilities. In fact I found one of the most moving sections of letters those she wrote to her husband when she was far away traveling in Europe. Her husband was throughout their marriage an anchor and source of strength. He did not care for or understand her poetry, and was worlds away from her politically but he gave her love and support. In these letters to him she expresses her deep appreciation and love for him.

In many of the other letters Sexton expresses love and admiration for her correspondents. She had many friends and in writing to them she expresses such strong positive feelings for their work and person that it is no wonder many became long- time friends. And this when her intensity and demandingness emotionally did often lead to cooling of relationships in time.

Sexton in a moving final letter to her daughter, writes " No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. life is not easy.It is awfully lonely. I know that. now you know it- wherever you are ,Linda, talking to me. But I've had a good life- I wrote unhappy- but I lived to the hilt. You too Linda- Live to the HILT!To the top. .."

Sexton is one of those writers who follows the Salinger prescription and 'writes her heart out'. This is an especially moving collection of letters one filled with pain and love and generosity and ambition and beauty.

I first heard about Anne Sexton in one of my American Literature classes in college when we studied some of her works. Even though I was interested in a few of her poems at the time, I was quick to put her (and her writing) out of my mind. It wasn't until a few years later that I rediscovered Anne in a local bookstore; I happened to see a book called "Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters." Curious, I flipped through some of the pages and started reading fragments of her letters. Moments later, I decided that I wanted to purchase the book. Though it took me a while to read the biography, I became fascinated with Anne and all aspects of her life. The fact that this biography explores both her personal and professional life attracted me as a reader. The title, in itself, is interesting because it caught my attention, and I had never before read a person's biography that consisted mainly of letters--written to acquaintances and loved ones. It was a new experience for me, and a very enjoyable one at that! It seems that nowadays, for the most part, letters are disregarded as they have been replaced by e-mails and text messages. Reading Anne's letters also reminded me of when I used to write to various friends all over the world. Though I have stopped writing letters, Anne's biography took me back in time and allowed me to live vicariously through her written word. "Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters" is a definite must have for those who wish to delve further into the mind of a brilliant poet.