Searching for Mercy Street by Linda Gray Sexton
"Searching for Mercy Street" by Linda Gray Sexton is a poignant memoir that delves into the complexities of growing up with a mother, Anne Sexton, who struggled with severe mental illnesses beyond just depression and mania. Through her narrative, Linda seeks to untangle the emotional turmoil of her childhood, providing insight into the impact of her mother's erratic behavior and creative genius on the family dynamic. The memoir highlights the stark contrasts in Anne's life, from her role as a celebrated poet to the challenges posed by her psychological struggles, including her frequent absences and dependence on medication.
Linda shares both the painful and tender moments of their relationship, illustrating how her mother's creative pursuits often overshadowed family life. The book also reflects Linda's journey through her own experiences with mental health, including her battles with clinical depression, as she strives to reclaim the positive memories of her childhood. Additionally, Linda's role as Anne’s literary executor adds a layer of emotional complexity to her narrative, embodying her struggle to honor her mother’s legacy while processing her own grief and experiences. Overall, "Searching for Mercy Street" offers a deeply personal exploration of familial bonds, mental illness, and the quest for understanding and reconciliation.
Searching for Mercy Street by Linda Gray Sexton
First published: 1994
The Work
Anne Sexton’s elder daughter’s memoir recalls 45 Mercy Street (1969). Linda Gray Sexton, in her memoir, seeks to understand the complexities of her mother’s mental illnesses—that her mother had greater disorders than depression and mania. Linda Gray has been to several analysts herself and has gone through a period of clinical depression.
One of the daughter’s goals in this work is to put to rest all the speculation of what it must have been like to live with Anne. One may also argue that Linda Gray wants, through her writing, to reclaim her childhood, including the good times, when her mother was not in hospitals and emergency rooms or when her mother was not ignoring her and her sister in order to go into her study to write poetry.
Once the influence of poetry took, Anne became another woman. She was no longer content to be a decorative part of the house, nor to strut her beauty in downtown Boston. She sat for hours in her study, clacking away on her typewriter, chain-smoking cigarettes and staying up until the early hours of the morning. Then she had to take tranquilizers to sleep, and she would sleep until late afternoon. Linda Gray tells horrific stories, one of her mother showing her her extra pills: a quart bottle filled to capacity sitting in the back of her closet. No wonder her mother always had pills for her suicide attempts.
The author also tells of the time her father insisted that the family sit down to dinner, in spite of his wife’s protests. They all sat quietly for a few moments and then her mother jumped up and ran to a bathroom, where they could hear her vomiting. Anne was not around much. When she was not teaching, she was traveling, either alone or with her own rock band, performing somewhere. When Anne was home, she often invited the band over to rehearse, which the father hated.
Linda Gray reveals day-to-day events, including some touching scenes of Anne revising her poems based on what Linda said. Linda’s sister Joy Sexton is almost invisible in this book, as she has been in the memoirs assembled about Anne Sexton. Linda, on the other hand, was named literary executor in her mother’s will, a job she maintained until the early 1990’s. It was an emotionally exhausting job; in a sense, Searching for Mercy Street is her catharsis from it.
Bibliography
Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
McClatchy, J. D. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Sexton, Anne. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.