Half in Love

Starred review from March 28, 2011
To forge one's own life free of a parent's shadow is a challenge for any child, but when that child was born to renowned poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide in 1974, the challenge takes on a particularly dark dimension. For Sexton, the shadow hides emotional turmoil and a legacy of mental illness passed generation to generation; despite determination to break the chain, Linda acknowledges passing it to her sons as well. With extraordinary transparency, the author intimately recalls her relationship with her unstable mother, who preened her daughter as an extension of herself before finally abandoning her. Sexton even includes an honest confession of the guilt she felt in succumbing to the legacy passed from her mother rather than ending it. The array of deep emotions here make it impossible not to sympathize with the author, and perhaps her raw account will leave the reader with an alternate legacy: the knowledge of the sometimes suicidal pain of mental illnesses and the love and care needed to overcome it. Sexton's second memoir (after Searching for Mercy Street) is a valuable examination of a dark and complicated subject.

October 15, 2010

Having affectingly grappled with the demons that led to her mother's suicide in Searching for Mercy Street (1994), Sexton takes on her own in this stinging chronicle of a road to three attempted suicides.

The author begins the story, and punctuates it throughout, by revisiting her mother's mental illness. Anne Sexton, the celebrated confessional poet, came from a long line of depressives. Though she may have passed a suicide gene along to her daughter, she also did much to nurture the urge, speaking to her of the voices in her head, accusing her daughter of being the one who made her sick and being altogether too confessional when it came to lovers and sex. So Sexton fille had plenty of fuel for her own depression, which was voracious and amplified by motherhood, a grim cocktail of loneliness, grief, despair, migraines, a bipolarism that swung between gloom and agitation (no euphoric highs here) and a terrible descent from mind pain to physical pain. Sexton is a dark wizard at describing her misery, which effectively turned her into a zombie, and the impulses that drove her to start cutting herself: "It's a way of letting the poison out. Taking control again...It makes the voice in my head shut up. To bleed is a way of knowing you're alive." The author provokes both scorn and sympathy, and she ably captures both the corrosive emotional storm in her head and the exhausted wariness she produces in others. Only occasionally does she overwrite—"I was ready to make music with the keyboard of my wrist"—and lose the scouring immediacy of her condition, when "[s]uicide simply came up from behind and took me in a bear hug" and she became "a mother who, as her own mother before her, had lost her grip on love."

An elucidating, caustic engagement with the author's depression.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2011
Half in love with easeful death is how poet John Keats described his dreamy sense that death would be a welcome release. Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of Anne Sexton, should have been immunized against suicide by the pain of losing her mother, who took her own life at the height of her fame as one of the prime movers in the confessional poetry movement. But in midlife, as her own writing career seemed stalled and her marriage more distant than satisfying, Sexton found herself hounded by the same demons that had destroyed her mother. She writes of three suicide attempts in grim and detailed prose, but at the end she describes a newly settled and happier life with the demons held at bay. The rather rushed ending feels less settled than Sexton probably intended, but overall this is a welcome personal look at the specter that haunts many families, in which a parents suicide can threaten the mental health of descendants.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)