Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

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Mother, are you listening? This is what I have seen and heard and learned. I am the forty-year old Linda and I am ready to speak back. It has taken twenty years for Linda Gray Sexton to address these words to her mother, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide on October 4, 1974. Anne Sexton's chronic mental illness was the anguished center of her family's life. While there were wonderful days, long afternoons spent discussing books, poems, and feelings - watching her grow excited when ...
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0316782084 First Paperback edition. 1994. An unread copy. Has 6 small black dots on the top edge. Sold at publisher's suggested retail price (339).

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More About This Book

Overview

Mother, are you listening? This is what I have seen and heard and learned. I am the forty-year old Linda and I am ready to speak back. It has taken twenty years for Linda Gray Sexton to address these words to her mother, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide on October 4, 1974. Anne Sexton's chronic mental illness was the anguished center of her family's life. While there were wonderful days, long afternoons spent discussing books, poems, and feelings - watching her grow excited when one of my lines pleased her filled me with a shy ecstasy - the gentle moments were hard to remember. Too often, Anne's outrageous behavior made her children cower in fear for the stability of their family. The bond between mother and daughter was never easy or clear. As a child, Linda was sent away from home for months - caring for Linda overwhelmed Anne, who confessed to having murderous impulses toward her daughter. Later, Anne would suffocate Linda with a capricious possessiveness Linda would learn to recognize as psychological and sexual abuse. I made myself numb, made my body like a stone in exchange for my mother's love. Linda eventually realized she had to break from her mother's toxic embrace in order to save herself. Searching for Mercy Street is the product of an arduous emotional and intellectual journey of two decades, during which Linda Gray Sexton became an adult and a mother and discovered her own lyrical voice as a novelist; only to find herself fighting the same demons of depression she had watched control her mother. Was I turning into her? I wondered with a flat sort of horror. Had I become "her kind"? Searching for Mercy Street is a story with which every mother and daughter will identify, because Linda Gray Sexton writes with profound honesty about this most formative of all relationships: our first. This daughter's memoir provides uniquely personal insights that no biographer or critic has - or could - have offered into the life of

The daughter of poet Anne Sexton offers an honest, unsparing memoir that brings to life the emotional roller coaster ride that was life with Anne--the wild mood swings, inappropriate sexual behavior, midnight ambulance rides to the psychiatric ward--as well as the fierce love that bound Linda and her mother together. Photos.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Sexton's memoir recalls growing up with her unstable and self-destructive poet mother, who killed herself when her daughter was 21. (Jan.)
Library Journal
Sexton, a novelist and notably the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, wrote this memoir as an antidote for a depression-induced writer's block brought on, in part, by her mother's legacy. With the bias and insight only she could have, Sexton tells the story of her life with a mother who was profoundly mentally ill: depressed, deranged, suicidal, and addicted to medications, alcohol, and sex. Anne Sexton committed suicide at the age of 45 after naming her 21-year-old daughter her literary executor. This cathartic and anguish-filled book spares no detail of the mother's selfish and difficult personality or her intense and fortifying love. Sexton also briefly addresses the controversy surrounding Diane Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography LJ 8/91. Recommended for humanities collections as well as comprehensive psychology collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/94.]-Janice Braun, Hoover Inst. Lib., Stanford, Cal.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780316782081
  • Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
  • Publication date: 12/1/1995
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 320
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.21 (h) x 0.95 (d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
The Letter 3
In Exile 11
First Metaphors 38
A Maker of Myths 62
More Than Myself 76
Companionship 89
Live or Die 123
Independence 131
The Making of a Literary Executor 168
The Rowing Endeth 187
Afterward 199
Self-Portrait 206
Between Two Worlds 216
In Search of a Biographer 221
Call Me Mother 240
Exposures 264
On the Back of Love 283
The Starting Point 294
Mercy Street 302
Notes and Sources 305
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Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted July 22, 2004

    Life Changing

    This novel not only looks deep into the soul of the writer, but touches the reader in a way undescribable. Even if you don't think this book pertains to your life, it will. There is a the child in all of us that just doesnt understand why the world must work as it does. This book is definitely an emotional journey worth taking.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted July 16, 2010

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