Word: confrontation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This past October 4 marked the 20th anniversary of poet Anne Sexton's suicide. Two decades later, her extraordinary life and death still loom large, haunting those who knew her personally and intriguing those who only know her through her work. In a courageous attempt to confront the burden of her mother's legacy and appease her own demons, author Linda Gray Sexton '75 has released her own memoirs, Searching for Mercy Street. Though Gray Sexton does not hesitate to point the proverbial finger at her mother, blaming her for a life out of a control, her cathartic opus...
...that swirled around her mother's depression (suicidal tendencies, alcoholism, writer's block) seemed liable to reappear in the author's life at any time, and indeed they did. As hard as she tried to fight them (or perhaps because she tried so hard), Gray Sexton was forced to confront all of her mother's anxieties in her own adult life. The author discusses her overwhelming fear of failing her babies and consequently smothering them with attention. She talks about not being able to write and the intense depression that resulted from her dry spells. There is mention of potential...
...Gray Sexton successful in overcoming all of these obstacles when her mother seemed so ill-equipped to cope? The author allowed herself to confront, accept and forgive the sins of her past. The abuse. The violent household. The instability. The codependence. Through therapy, through semi-autobiographical novels (Gray Sexton has authored four) and through dealing with her mother's work as her executor, she has been able to move forward. These memoirs are the final leg in Gray Sexton's long emotional journey. Street is an indulgence she must allow herself. Anne Sexton had her poetry and her therapy...
...formulated in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and has modified somewhat in the interim. This presupposition, as so much in Bloom's criticism, is difficult to state succinctly. For openers, writers who wish to be "strong," that is, to produce works worthy of the Canon, must first confront and somehow conquer the power of "strong" writers who preceded them: "Any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts." What others simply regard as literary imitation Bloom recasts as Darwinian or Freudian struggles for dominance: "Tradition is not only a handing-down or process...
Clinton's Diplomacy: The failure to confront evil...