Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother."
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.
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."
Mother had been living and dying for all of the twenty-one years I had known her," recalls novelist Sexton (Private Acts) of Anne Sexton (1928-1974), the depressive, alcoholic, successfully suicidal poet who perhaps best exemplified the "confessional" literary movement. This memoir was written because the younger Sexton "needed an exorcism." Toward that end, she here evokes both her mother's furiously creative and destructive powers in scenes that include happy literary hobnobbing between the two women and grisly incestuous interludes imposed by the mother.
New book.