Anne Sexton was an accomplished poet, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die (1966).
The poet Maxine Kumin was a good friend who knew Sexton and her work well. Kumin wrote of Sexton's confessional poetry, "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry." Sexton completed an unusual revisioning of some of the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm — Transformations (1971), which I sometimes asked my students to explore beside the traditional Grimm translations.
Sexton suffered from bipolar disorder, then called manic depression. Working with Kumin on revising the galleys of her last volume of poems, The Awful Rowing Toward God (published posthumously in 1975), Sexton returned home, put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
Much has been written about Sexton's life and death, as well as her experiences in psychotherapy, including a wrenching biographical/autobiographical volume by her daughter Linda Gray Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, and a controversial biography by Diane Middlebrook.*
Denise Levertov wrote, "We who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."
This is a letter written by Sexton to her 40-year-old daughter Linda.
Dear Linda,
I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all alone in the seat I whispered to her “I know, Mother, I know.” (Found a pen!) And I thought of you – someday flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me. And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won’t be flying, maybe it will be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are 40. Anytime.) – I want to say back.
1st I love you.
2. You never let me down.
3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 with a dead mother who I needed still. . . .
This is my message to the 40 year old Linda. No matter what happens you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It is awfully lonely. I know that. Now you too know it – wherever you are, Linda, talking to me. But I’ve had a good life – I wrote unhappy – but I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda – Live to the HILT! To the top. I love you 40 year old Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what you are!—Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart – I’m in both: if you need me. I lied, Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her – or she me! Silly Anne! So there!
XOXOXO
Mom
* See also — but take care in assessing — Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977).