Content Warning: This episode contains references to suicide. Listener discretion is advised. Please take care of yourself and seek support if needed.
In this moving episode of Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, travel back to October 1994 to hear Linda Gray Sexton speak candidly about the complex legacy of being Anne Sexton's daughter. Her intimate presentation at Harbourfront, allows the author to reflect on the tangled relationship between a brilliant, troubled poet and the daughter who became her literary executor at age 21—the same year Anne took her own life.
Listen as she shares the unforgettable moment of discovering a letter her mother wrote to "the 40-year-old Linda," a message across time that served as both farewell and benediction. She explores the honest, painful inversions of their relationship—including the unsettling ritual of "playing nine," where adult and child traded places in ways no child should experience. Yet she also retrieves moments of pure maternal love, like a rainy Thanksgiving afternoon when they lay together watching pheasants in the yard, a memory Anne would immortalize in her poem "The Fortress."
This recording captures Linda at a pivotal moment: twenty years after her mother's death, having moved from anger through empathy to forgiveness, ready at last to speak back to the voice that never stopped addressing her. Her journey illuminates the weight of literary executorship, the complications of loving someone who was both mentor and burden, and the hard-won understanding that came only after she herself became a mother and weathered her own depression.
As Anne Sexton wrote in the poem that gives this episode its title: "I walk, I walk. / I hold matches at street signs / for it is dark, / as dark as the leathery dead / and I have lost my green eyes / my way, my way." Anne Sexton spent her life searching for 45 Mercy Street—that metaphorical home where past and present reconcile, where confrontation joins hands with forgiveness. She never found it. But perhaps, in writing this memoir, her daughter finally did.
***
SHOW NOTES
The audio recording of Linda Gray Sexton was recorded on stage at Harbourfront Reading Series in October 1994 and is used with the permission of Linda Gray Sexton and the Toronto International Festival of Authors. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Click here to check out Seasons One and Two of Writers Off the Page where you'll be able to listen to more than 30 previous episodes which feature Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, Carlos Fuentes, Jamaica Kincaid and many more.
Recommended Reading & ViewingBooks by Anne Sexton
- Live or Die (1966) - Pulitzer Prize winner
- Transformations (1971)
- 45 Mercy Street (1976, posthumous)
- Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977) [ebook]
Books by Linda Gray Sexton
- Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994)
- Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide (2011)
- Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmations (2014)
Books About Anne Sexton
- With Robert Lowell & his circle : Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and others (2012)
- Three-martini afternoons at the Ritz : the rebellion of Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton (2021)
About the Host of Writers Off the Page
Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he serves as advisor on civil discourse and vice-dean undergraduate, in the Faculty of Arts and Science. He has written seven books, including four novels. His work has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection. He regularly contributes essays, opinions and reviews to publications including the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Financial Times of London, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Globe and Mail, and appears frequently on CBC Radio. A former president of PEN Canada, Boyagoda lives in Toronto with his wife and their four daughters.
Music is by Yuka
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
