Linda Gray Sexton. (2011). Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Catapult.

Linda Gray Sexton. 2011. Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Catapult.

Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Catapult, 2011.

Linda Gray Sexton. Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Catapult, 2011.

OverDrive Product Record

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Searching for Mercy Street

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

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My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

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1. • value: family
2. • value: Biography
3. • value: American Poetry
4. • value: health
5. • value: family life
6. • value: Female Poets
7. • value: autobiographies
8. • value: Fiction
9. • value: novels
10. • value: Autobiography
11. • value: Suicide
12. • value: Memoirs
13. • value: childhood trauma
14. • value: true story
15. • value: Inspirational
16. • value: biographies
17. • value: Essays
18. • value: mental illness
19. • value: women poets
20. • value: depression
21. • value: Mothers and daughters
22. • value: memoir
23. • value: fiction books
24. • value: mother daughter relationship
25. • value: biographies and memoirs
26. • value: literary memoirs
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28. • value: Anne Sexton
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31. • value: memoir books
32. • value: autobiography books
33. • value: books fiction
34. • value: mother daughter book
35. • value: anne sexton complete poems

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Sexton, Linda Gray
   • bioText: Linda Gray Sexton is the daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Anne Sexton. She has written four novels, and her second memoir, Half in Love, was published by Counterpoint in January 2011. She lives in California.
   • name: Linda Gray Sexton

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2011-04-10T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Searching for Mercy Street

fullDescription

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
An honest, intimate memoir that offers a “candid, often painful depiction of a daughter’s struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother”—the poet Anne Sexton (New York Times)
This is an honest, unsparing account of the anguish and fierce love that bound a difficult mother and the daughter she left behind. Linda Sexton was 21 when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s life.
Growing up with Anne Sexton was a wild mixture of suicidal depression and manic happiness, inappropriate behavior and midnight trips to the psychiatric ward. Anne taught Linda how to write, how to see, how to imagine—and only Linda could have written a book that captures so vividly the intimate details and lingering emotions of their life together. Searching for Mercy Street speaks to everyone who admires Anne Sexton and to every daughter or son who knows the pain of an imperfect childhood.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     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.

popularity

7

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subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Poetry

publishDateText

04/10/2011

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shortDescription

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
An honest, intimate memoir that offers a “candid, often painful depiction of a daughter’s struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother”—the poet Anne Sexton (New York Times)
This is an honest, unsparing account of the anguish and fierce love that bound a difficult mother and the daughter she left behind. Linda Sexton was 21 when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s life.
Growing up with Anne Sexton was a wild mixture of suicidal depression and manic happiness, inappropriate behavior and midnight trips to the psychiatric ward. Anne taught Linda how to write, how to see, how to imagine—and only Linda could have written a book that captures so vividly the intimate details and lingering emotions of their life together. Searching for Mercy Street speaks to everyone who...

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

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My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

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   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Literary
2. • code: FAM052000
   • description: Family & Relationships / Dysfunctional Families
3. • code: POE024000
   • description: Poetry / Women Authors