Synopses & Reviews
Review
Praise for
Half in Love"A clear and in-depth portrait of what it is like to attempt to take ones own life and the ghastly legacy such an action leaves the bereaved family. For anyone who wishes to understand what drives a person to kill himself or herself, Half in Love brings a deeper understanding of the illness than anything short of feeling the urge to commit suicide oneself." American Psychological Association Review of Books
"A welcome personal look at the specter that haunts many families, in which a parents suicide can threaten the mental health of descendants." Booklist
In a country where someone commits suicide every seventeen minutes, where bipolar disorder is rampant and poorly understood, Linda Sextons beautiful book is a cry for health and sanity. It will bring hope and understanding because it explains the way suicide blights families from generation to generation.” Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying
In her new memoir, Linda Sexton completes the circle opened up with her stunning memoir, Searching for Mercy Streetbut this time, the woman whose torment she explores is not her mother, but herself, and where her mothers story ended with despair, hers is one of survival. With brutal honesty and total lack of self-pity or sentimentality, Linda Sexton has dared to explore a subject more taboo than almost any other: not only suicide, but what comes after, for its survivors. This is a book that will speak to anyone touched by the suicide of someone we knew or lovedas so many of us have been.” Joyce Maynard, author of At Home in the World and To Die For
Half in Love is a gripping account of the legacy left by a mothers suicide and an eloquent testament to a daughters struggle to wrench herself free of the damage left in the wake of turmoil. Linda Sextons determination to forge an identity independent of suicide and destruction is powerful; her book is a vivid and inspiring story of living through despair and coming out the stronger for it.” Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, and Professor of Psychiatry, John Hopkins School of Medicine
Linda Sexton is one hell of a brave writer. In her memoir, she takes us on a harrowing journey, to the edge of death and then beyond, to a new, safe place. Shes now able to tell her story about the entanglement with her mothers legacyhalf in love with easeful death. Its a story that will reach deep into many readers hearts. She makes the telling of this tale an act of grace, of art, of redemption.” Ellen Sussman, author of On a Night Like This and the upcoming French Lessons
This is an exquisitely crafted story that needs to be told: how depression and suicide can be passed down through the generations. The most loving, committed mother can suffer such intense pain that all reason is blacked out and death seems the only answer. Linda Sexton is unsparing in her honesty and unfailing in her eloquence as she takes us from the descent to hell to the miracle of recovery. After a siege of courting death, she comes to fall wholly in love with life.” Sara Davidson, author of Leap! and Loose Change
Once again, Sexton has pulled off something truly remarkablein prose that is both graceful and raw she crafts powerful scenes that vibrate with authenticity. I cannot recall a more riveting description of a nearly lethal suicide attempt. The suspense leaps off the pages, pages which the reader is now turning furiously. Also powerful is her deep understanding of how suicide permanently impacts the family through multiple generations and her descriptions of self-stigmatization, which, by the way, belong in mental health curricula.” Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, MD, Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University, Former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health
Half in Love is a testament to the potentially mortal wounds that suicide inflicts upon the living. Linda Gray Sexton has transformed her emotional suffering into a memoir of stunning intimacy. Wise, insightful, and unflinchingly honest, Sexton mines the depths of the darkest despair and ultimately her own salvation. This is a masterful work, beautifully written, by a brave soul of remarkable talent.” James Brown, author of The Los Angeles Diaries and This River
Praise for Searching for Mercy Street
Powerful and affecting . . . a candid, often painful, depiction of a daughters struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother. 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 or a mercurial, impossible, and magnetic woman.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A courageous journey into the dark terrain of remembering, forgiving and healing through tellinga trait that is her birthright.” People
One never doubts that Linda Gray Sexton has told us the truth . . . 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.” The New York Times Book Review
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
In this spectacular story of a glamorous, talented and beautiful family veering toward disaster, Linda Sexton has broken the code of silence which often surrounds the American home. In her powerful and graceful prose, honed in four novels of her own, she has quietly and lovingly told the story of her mother and the family she loved both too much and too little. Any mother or daughter, any child of an alcoholic parent, anyone who has lived with the all-consuming obsession of a writer with their work, will recognize themselves in this ravishing portrait.” Susan Cheever
In this deft, beautiful memoir, Sexton covers difficult family territory with unique grace.” New York Daily News
Sexton has written about intense personal conflicts, evoked strong emotion, and stayed true to it. The saga of this daughter and her mother is inherently fascinating.” Chicago Tribune
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, The Washington Post Book World
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.” Los Angeles Times Book Review
Heroic.” New York Newsday
This cathartic and anguish-filled book spares no details of the mothers selfish and difficult personality or her intense and fortifying love.” Library Journal
In deceptively fluid prose, Linda explores her complex relationship to her mother and strips raw the nerves of a troubled family.” Kirkus (starred review)
Synopsis
After the agony of witnessing her mothers multipleand ultimately successfulsuicide attempts, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of the acclaimed poet Anne Sexton, struggles with an engulfing undertow of depression. Here, with powerful, unsparing prose, Sexton conveys her urgent need to escape the legacy of suicide that consumed her familya topic rarely explored, even today, in such poignant depth.
Linda Gray Sexton tries multiple times to kill herselfeven though as a daughter, sister, wife, and most importantly, a mother, she knows the pain her act would cause. But unlike her mothers story, Lindas is ultimately one of triumph. Through the help of family, therapy, and medicine, she confronts deep-seated issues and curbs the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit.
Synopsis
"Linda Sexton's beautiful book is a cry for health and sanity . . . It explains the way suicide blights families from generation to generation." --Erica Jong
After the agony of witnessing her mothers multiple--and ultimately successful--suicide attempts, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of the acclaimed poet Anne Sexton, struggles with an engulfing undertow of depression. Here, with powerful, unsparing prose, Sexton conveys her urgent need to escape the legacy of suicide that consumed her family--a topic rarely explored, even today, in such poignant depth.
Linda Gray Sexton tries multiple times to kill herself--even though as a daughter, sister, wife, and most importantly, a mother, she knows the pain her act would cause. But unlike her mother's story, Linda's is ultimately one of triumph. Through the help of family, therapy, and medicine, she confronts deep-seated issues and curbs the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit.
"This book looks into the workings of the suicidal mind in a way that isn't easily forgotten, raising provocative questions about how we approach and treat the severely mentally ill." --The New York Times Book Review
"With brutal honesty and total lack of self-pity or sentimentality, Linda Sexton has dared to explore a subject more taboo than almost any other: not only suicide, but what comes after, for its survivors. This is a book that will speak to anyone touched by the suicide of someone we knew or loved--as so many of us have been." --Joyce Maynard, New York Times bestselling author
Synopsis
With powerful, unsparing prose, the daughter of acclaimed poet Anne Sexton conveys her urgent need to escape the legacy of suicide that has consumed her family.