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

Table of Contents

Sexton writes with compelling urgency and candor and has not tried to gloss over the difficulties of their relationship or resolve the ambivalence of her own emotions. Rather, she has set all these conflicts down on paper, leaving us with a disturbing portrait of a mercurial, impossible, and magnetic woman.

MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Her writing is at its best: lean, quick, tightly conceived.... The book almost reeks of authenticity. Searching for Mercy Street is never less than fascinating.

Linda Gray Sextons exploration is so smart, so well-written, moving, and generous that it transcends the typecasting that could easily have become a trap.... Written with grace, precision, and most important, love.

Heroic.

This memoir has an urgency about it and it is to Sextons credit as an honest and largely unself-serving narrator that throughout she has chosen to forgo the primitive gratification of scrawling over the picture of her childish mother-worship with fat black crayon; instead, she continues to add strokes of color and lightness to an ever-darkening portrait. By the books end, she has made her way valiantly back to her mother, passing through the portals of rage and despair before she glimpses the possibility of separating out Anne Sextons perverse influence from her legacy of delight in words and experience.... Searching for Mercy Street is suffused with a complicated kind of love.

DAPHNE MERKIN, THE NEW YORKER

One of the most illuminating things here is that careful, industrious Lindawho, as she grows older, bravely fights off her own depressions, headaches, even suicidal thoughts, idolizing normalcy, health, and domestic responsibilityseems a far better writer than her mom.

CAROLYN SEE, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

Without glossing over the damage her mother did, Sexton finds it in her heart not just to forgive Anne, but to acknowledge that her legacy includes creativity and joy as well as pain.

The suspense and insight, the emotional insight and poetry, of a first-rate novel.

This cathartic and anguish-filled book spares no details of the mothers selfish and difficult personality or her intense and fortifying love.

In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family.

KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEW

This memoir, beautifully written and searingly frank, explores the mysteries and consequences of madness, creativity, love, and the courageous act of telling painful truths.

In this deft, beautiful memoir, Sexton covers difficult family territory with unique grace.

Sexton forcefully communicates the fear, repulsion, neediness, and sorrow that filled her childhood, as well as the agony of her own mental breakdown and her terror of becoming like her mother, in lucid and vivid prose.

Sexton traces the darkness in her own life to early, heartbreaking trauma. Her prose reels you in.

Conveyed with extraordinary power, Lindas brave story ... ends on a note of peace, telling the hard-won truth.

Sextons memoir is an extraordinary exploration.... Searching for Mercy Street is utterly sincere, hungry for truth, and beautifully written.

As brave and honest and forceful a reminiscence as a reader is likely to find. Searching for Mercy Street, Sextons seventh book, will be the book that seals her literary reputation even as it lays her mothers mysterious persona to rest.

LEXINGTON (KENTUCKY) HERALD-LEADER

Shes still her mothers daughter, both in the intense grace of her prose and her headlong commitment to the truth.

Lindas often graceful struggle to come to terms with the way her mother treated her and her own momentsas a mother, a writer, a sometime problem drinker occasionally acquainted with depressionof discovering a real kinship with her mothers shadow side, are darkly fascinating.

FICTION

NONFICTION

If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON, COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.... Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the worlds great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

NORMAN MACLEAN, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

INTRODUCTION

Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton began as a letter to my mother, a personal message of mourning and celebration that meditated on our complicated life together. She had died in 1975, during my twenty-first year, by committing suicide. I was only a college senior then, and I had held conflicted emotions about her life for many years when I finally sat down to write this book late in 1992.

In 1994, as the book appeared on the shelves of stores throughout the country, I began to receive moving letters from both women and men telling me that my story encouraged them to look once again at their own relationships with their parentsand with their children. Though I had initially written the memoir to better understand the complexities of my life, in the months following publication I began to realize that as other people read Searching for Mercy Street they started to better understand themselves. It seems as if it is a universal story: how do we learn to accept and forgive those who have both succeeded and failed in helping us become who we are? The journey back of which the subtitle speaks is one all of us have to make as we face the death of our parents and our contemplation of their lives.

As I wrote the book, I found myself reliving times that were both painful and joyous, accompanied by intense emotion. Many readers asked me if the process of writing it had been cathartic, and the first time the question was posed, I hesitated, looking for the right way to explain how writing a memoir impacts ones life. It had not been cathartic, exactly. The catharsis had happened before I wrote the book, in my analysts office. Writing it had been more like testifying, to myself as well as others, that such things had happened to me and that they acquired increased importance when reexamined. As I told my own story, I validated my lifes experiences and toughened myself; it was a part of my selfeducation, one that helped me gain control over what had once seemed unmanageable. Silence compels us to look at what lies behind it, and revelation brings with it knowledgewhich is why some feel as if they must write about the private aspects of their lives, in search of solace and clarity. To speak candidly, with neither justification nor humiliation, relieves the haunting of memory and mind and becomes one way to regain our dignity and our strength.