Searching for Mercy Street

October 3, 1994
``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 (and first related, more briefly and diplomatically, in Diane Middlebrook's controversial biography, Anne Sexton). The younger Sexton tries to sketch a family dynamic that involves several generations, and she tells the story of her own struggle to break free of maternal dominance even while serving as her mother's literary executor. Her book may well be appreciated in the recovery market (the author also describes her own bouts with alcoholism, anxiety and depression). But the often maudlin writing, evasion of detail in preference for melodrama and aversion to the fine points of storytelling are likely to annoy literary readers and devotees of the poet. So is the daughter's unabated drive to justify herself as the abused survivor of an (evidently) greatly misguided parent. Sexton's poetry will continue to astonish readers long after this memoir has vanished. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC alternate; author tour.

January 1, 1996
Sexton's memoir recalls growing up with her unstable and self-destructive poet mother, who killed herself when her daughter was 21.