The poet's daughter recalls the dramatic mood swings, love affairs, and flagrant sexuality of her mother, as well as the intense and intimate relationship they shared despite the psychological problems that ended in her mother's suicide. 25,000 first printing. Tour.
Linda Gray Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1953 and graduated from Harvard University in 1975. She is the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton, and has edited several books of her mother's poetry and a book of her mother's letters, as well as writing a memoir about her life with her mother, "Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, Anne Sexton." "Rituals," "Mirror Images," "Points of Light," and "Private Acts" are her four published and widely read novels. "Points of Light" was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame Special for television.
"Searching for Mercy Street" was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and reviewed to overwhelming critical acclaim. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the book this way: "Powerful and affecting...a candid, often painful, depiction of a daughter's struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother. Sexton writes with compelling urgency and candor...a disturbing portrait of a mercurial, impossible and magnetic woman."
Sexton's most recent memoir, "Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide" (Counterpoint Press January 11, 2011) is about her struggle with her own mental illness and the legacy of suicide left to her by her mother, who killed herself when Sexton was twenty-one. Through the help of family, therapy and medicine, Sexton confronted deep-seated issues, outlived her mother and curbed the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit. The book is a story of triumph.
In pre-publication praise, Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying" and "Seducing the Demon," says, "In a country where someone commits suicide every seventeen minutes, where bipolar disorder is rampant and poorly understood, Linda Sexton's beautiful book is a cry for health and sanity. It will bring hope and understanding because it explains the way suicide blights families from generation to generation." Joyce Maynard, author of "Labor Day" and "At Home in the World," writes: "In her new memoir, Linda Sexton completes the full circle opened up with her stunning memoir, "Searching for Mercy Street"--but this time, the woman whose torment she explores is not her mother, but herself, and where her mother's story ended with despair, hers is one of survival. With brutal honesty and total lack of self-pity or sentimentality, Linda Sexton has dared to explore a subject more taboo than almost any other: not only suicide, but what comes after, for survivors. This is a book that will speak to anyone touched by the suicide of someone we knew or loved--as so many of us have been."
All her books are available on Amazon.com in either new or used editions. She lives in California with her husband and her two sons.
Please visit www.lindagraysexton.com to learn more about Linda and her books, connect with other readers, and join the conversation about the issues present in her work.
