Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, discusses her 1994 memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton in this powerful archival recording from the Toronto International Festival of Authors.
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.
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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.
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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.
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT
RANDY BOYAGODA: Welcome to Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, produced by the Toronto Public Library and in association with the Toronto Festival of Authors. I’m Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, writer Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of the American poet Anne Sexton, tells us about what happens when family life, writing life, and life and death itself come together in ways you’d never want, but then have to deal with, in person and on the page.
Linda Gray Sexton: A mother speaking from the grave to her daughter who sits at her kitchen table alone. A mother saying goodbye. Over time, I have come to understand that this letter is most certainly the suicide note I sought that night in 1974, a metaphorical one perhaps directed solely to me, but a trumpet call, heralding her intentions nevertheless. No wonder I had fought acknowledging it in 1969. That night, I was physically alone in the house where my mother had killed herself only a month earlier, yet still she sat by my side. I was unmarried. I was childless and motherless. I was young and without voice. I still had not come close to the point in my life of which she spoke, my 40th year.
RB: I’d like to hear what writer Linda Gray Sexton makes of that famous line from William Wordsworth, from his poem “My Heart Leaps Up,” that “The Child is father of the Man.” Generally speaking, the line is read as an expression of hope that the joyful sensations of early life remain with the speaker as both a grown Man and in turn, an old man. Linda Gray Sexton’s life, or, I should say, her life and work, as the daughter of American poet Anne Sexton, offers a very different sense of what it means for a child to experience things, as a child, that stay with them for the rest of their lives. In this 1994 visit to Toronto, Sexton discusses as much in the context of her memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to my Mother, Anne Sexton. Anne Sexton was a prominent American poet in the 1950s and 1960s, known in particular for writing poetry about the darker parts of private life in relation to the darkness she saw in the world around her. She killed herself in 1974 at the far end of an extended period of mental distress and deterioration. In 1974, Linda, her older daughter, was 21 years old and had already been made her mother’s literary executor: as she tells us in her remarks, she didn’t want this, and her mother didn’t care that she didn’t want this. In fact, seeming looking ahead, she made her literary executor on her 21st birthday, and committed suicide later that same year. Twenty years later, Linda published a memoir about coming to her terms with the double and braided legacies of her mother’s life and death: of losing her person but being responsible for her words, and, both in and beyond this, finding her own sense of self in both family and literary terms. What you’re going to hear is not so much an interview as a presentation of a past and present self profoundly impacted by a major presence and absence. Linda reflects on many inversions associated with her relationship to her mother, which includes reading letters from a past Anne Sexton to a future Linda Gray Sexton. But what especially comes to mind is the sequence she reads from the memoir, about what sometimes happened in the Sexton household on Sunday mornings, something Anne Sexton called “Playing 9.” You might think, as I did at first, that Anne Sexton was, unexpectedly, a golfer. No. Instead, she was a damaged adult seeking from a nine-year old girl the kind of nurturing a nine-year old girl should have been seeking from her. The sequence itself is wrenching to hear read, never mind imagine the actual experience of it. That Linda went through this, and then invited readers into such an imagining, and then went beyond such suffering to a place of resolution, even understanding, about the metaphoric and very real burdens of being Anne Sexton’s daughter, won’t make your heart leap up, Wordsworth-style, but it’ll make your heart beat harder with feeling for, and from, Linda Gray Sexton’s life and writing about that life.
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Linda Gray Sexton: There's certainly a lot of you here, this is wonderful. I thought to myself, I was sitting outside by the water for a little while before I came in just thinking and wondering who would come on a Saturday afternoon to hear me speak about this, but it's getting a little gray and cold out there, I thought maybe this would be a cozy way to bundle up a bit. Last night, another author from the festival asked me if I was here to present Anne Sexton. And I said to her, "Yes, I am." But I thought to myself, "Present's really not the right word." I'm not a biographer, and in fact, I haven't written a biography. Perhaps some of you may have been here three years back when Diane Middlebrook came and did indeed present her biography of my mother. What I've written is not as measured, as dispassionate as a biography. I've written a memoir. I'm her daughter, I'm a novelist, so I write with a novelist's voice. And I think what I've written is rather heated and passionate and extremely emotional. And what I'd like to do today is not really to present Anne Sexton, but to try and bring her into the room. I'd like to reminisce about her, I'd like to remember her, I'd like to share what I feel and what I know about her with you. So I hope that that suits you all because that's what it's gonna be.
LGS: I think the first thing to tell you about is how I started writing Searching for Mercy Street, which is the name of my memoir. In my 39th year, a very strange thing began to happen to me, I discovered that though my mother had died when I was 21, she killed herself when I was 21, I discovered that I had reentered a period of mourning, and I couldn't understand why this was happening to me. I thought, no at 21, I went through so much, I became her literary executor, I worked through her archives, I dealt with family grief, I dealt with my own grief. Why was I suddenly plunged back into the middle of missing her? And this turned out to be a pretty provocative question for me, and I began to realize little by little that my grief for her had actually evolved. When she died when I was 21, I was not married, I had no children. I hadn't yet begun my own writing career, and I had a certain set of feelings about her, for her, which changed and matured as I changed and matured, so that as I approached my 40th year, I began to realize that the ways I felt about her had changed considerably.
LGS: And I think that those changes came about largely because time had passed and I'd had my own kids. One of the things that I was always the most judgemental about with my mother was the kind of mother she was. She was a wonderful role model as a poet. We spent many afternoons workshopping her poetry and mine together at our kitchen table. She took me traveling with her on reading trips. I was a companion to her, she really trained me, though I didn't realize it at the time, to be her literary executor, to understand what she was trying to accomplish with her work and to let me know what it was that was going to be expected of me if I was going to carry on in the way that she herself would have carried on had she been alive. So my quarrel with my mother was really more with the kind of mothering she had done, and it was very hard for me to accept. I felt I had lost my childhood and not really ever had a fair shake of it that way. As I had my own kids, I vowed I would be a totally different kind of mother, there was no chance that I was gonna repeat these errors. And I know you're laughing because all the time I hear other women say, "Oh, I can't believe that I said that to my son, I sounded just like my own mother." So I think we all come to grips at some point with the fact that we carry certain things in the family on, and sometimes the things we most dislike are the things we have to fight the hardest against.
LGS: So as I got closer to 40 and I'd been a mother for a while, I stopped being so judgemental and I started to empathize with her, and I think the other thing that probably factored in at this point was that I entered a period of a very deep depression of my own, and I began to understand her illness better, and I wasn't so judgemental about that either. So out of this growing sense of empathy, I found a lot of forgiveness for the things that I had been angry about, and with the forgiveness came a tremendous desire to write about her. Now, at the time she died, I wanted nothing to do with writing about her beyond the editorial work I was doing, I went on to write four of my own novels that were published and did fairly well, and I felt I was working on establishing my own voice, I really did not want to live under her shadow. So to say that I was ready to write about her is actually to say something very important. I thought I finally was ready to confront what had gone on between us and to be able to portray it in a pretty sensitive way. At the same time in my writing life, I was stuck. I published the four novels, I had begun work on a new one, sent half of it to my editor, my agent, and they hated it.
LGS: Started over, began something new, sent 100 pages to my editor and my agent and they hated it. So I was desperate and I had a major, major writer's block going, something else made me understand mother a lot better. And at this point, I just happened to go and see the movie, A River Runs Through It, which is Robert Redford's adaptation of Norman Maclean's novella. At the time I thought it was an autobiography, and as I watched it on the screen and then later went out and bought the book and read it, I was so struck with how he had taken difficult family issues, difficult family themes and conflicts and dealt with them so sensitively that I felt like I was living in that world, and I was very empathetic with all the characters. And I thought, "If he could do that, could I do that? Is this my time to do this? And is maybe that why everything else I've been writing hasn't been working out because I've been trying little by little to get to the place where I could really write about mother." So I started almost by writing a letter to her, and initially I didn't know whether or not I would publish anything, it just began. And what happened was, as if I had opened the door to a waterfall of emotion, once I began, I found I couldn't stop.
LGS: So I'd like to read to you a little bit from the book, from this first chapter, which I began almost as a letter to my mother. It is entitled The letter, but I'm not referring to the letter I'm writing, I'm referring instead to a letter that she had written to me. "The letter, written on a single sheet of legal length yellow paper was folded several times as if it had been in an envelope, it lay in my dresser drawer on top of the stash of letters housed in a rectangular metal box that had belonged to me since I was 12, a storehouse for all my most important and private documents. An envelope with a hank of my hair cut by my mother on Mother's Day in 1963, a record of all the money I had earned babysitting to defray the cost of my writing camp during adolescent summers. My report cards through high school, letters from a boy I had loved. This was a box I would never be without. A box I perused from time to time as I relived small moments of my own history. I put my hand out and touched the letter with one fingertip. Had I found it? Had I at last discovered the missing suicide note my mother must have written just before shutting herself into her car and starting up the engine?
LGS: Only a fool would accept the idea that the woman who had made a documentary out of her life would leave this world without a word. What more perfect safe place could she have selected for the last letter she would write? It was 1974, a few months after my mother, the poet Anne Sexton, had killed herself. I was 21, alone in the house that had sheltered my sister and me through our adolescence, the house that had witnessed the dissolution of my parents' 25-year-old marriage, heard the increasing clamour of my mother's mental illness, and a month previously, overseen her suicide in the garage. I picked it up, my hand shaking, neither the heading nor the closing of the letter was visible, but the black scrawl was immediately recognizable. My mother had begun this letter with a dull pencil and then continued on in her traditional thick, black felt tip pen. Around me, the house was silent, wrapped in the still November night.
LGS: I opened it and began to read, "Dear Linda. I'm 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,' and I thought of you some day flying somewhere all alone and me dead perhaps, and you wishing to speak to me, and I wanna 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. Any time. I wanna say back: first, I love you. Second, you never let me down. Third, I know, I was there once. I too was 40 and with a dead mother whom 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 feel, what you are. Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my poems or 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. Hugs and kisses, mom."
LGS: One of the things I really love about this letter is the way she turns it around at the end and kind of pokes fun at herself while revealing something very special that her mother... That she knew that her mother loved her on an intellectual level, even if she didn't feel loved with her heart, and I love the way she calls herself silly Anne. "It took time for the truth to infiltrate my muddy, excited brain. This was no suicide note, but rather a letter I had indeed seen before back in 1969, even though I read it now as if for the first time. A letter from my mother was always precious, and I had saved nearly every one I had ever received. During my years at summer camp, she had written me several times a week, I waited eagerly by the mailbox for her words from home. Some of those letters were safeguarded in this very metal box. How odd then did this yellow sheet of paper had not set off any tremor of recognition. When I had received it at 16, I must not have wanted to see or hear its words. Why not? What revelations had it contained that frightened me into blocking its existence from my mind for nearly five years? Wasn't the phrase "40-year-old Linda" the crux of it? The core of my resistance to reading and understanding this letter with my heart? She was writing to a woman whom at age 16, I had no desire to imagine, much less become. And she was speaking from the perspective of a mother who is gone.
LGS: A mother speaking from the grave to her daughter who sits at her kitchen table alone. A mother saying goodbye. Over time, I have come to understand that this letter is most certainly the suicide note I sought that night in 1974, a metaphorical one perhaps directed solely to me, but a trumpet call, heralding her intentions nevertheless, no wonder I had fought acknowledging it in 1969. That night I was physically alone in the house where my mother had killed herself only a month earlier. Yet still she sat by my side. I was unmarried. I was childless and motherless. I was young and without voice. I still had not come close to the point in my life of which she spoke, my 40th year. I sank down on the twin bed of my childhood room a top the flowered pink spread with which her body had been covered until the ambulance arrived. I was not a child. I was not a woman quite. I read her words again, felt her surrounding consuming presence and filled with longing. Overwhelmed, I cried with bitterness for all the arguing we had done just before her death. For the separations I had thrown between us in my desperation to grow up and out and away from her presence. For all the confusion I felt at hearing her difficult words, however uplifting, I might ultimately find them.
LGS: I missed her. I hated her for having left me. I hated her for remaining with me as strongly as she did, for following me around with words such as these, words I had no choice but to listen to. We had endured and shared so much together. She had been my mentor, my guide, my girlfriend, my teacher, my confidant. My creator, for she had shaped me as surely as God shaped Adam. My Romeo, for she had adored me for a time without reservation. While marking the beginning of the end of her own journey in this world, her letter to the 40-year-old Linda was the map that marked the start of my own long journey. Though at the time I was not able to recognize it as such, and had I done so, I would have turned away in despair and rebellion. But as it developed, the journey became an unconscious one, an inevitable requirement of living and maturing, a journey made by all daughters who have lost their mothers, and who come to that time in their lives when they must examine the love and loss inherent in this, the most important of all our relationships, the one upon which all others are based: our first. I had no choice about whether to accept the proffered map.
LGS: My mother spent all of her life seeking the metaphorical home she called Mercy Street. In the last years of her life, her sense of desperation intensified as she began to sense she would never find this place of what she often dreamed. She had by then prepared her last book of poetry for publication, entitled 45 Mercy Street, which contained poems written between 1971 and 1974. In the poem from which the book takes its title, she described the obsessive quality that had begun to characterize her search. In mother's mind, Mercy Street was the place where past and present reconciled, where confrontation joined hands with forgiveness. Perhaps she believed unconsciously that because she had not found Mercy Street by her 45th year, she would never find it, and perhaps this contributed to her despair as she approached her 46th birthday in 1974. Or perhaps she sensed that even if she should find Mercy Street, it would not be what she expected or needed. And so in the poem, she wakes herself from dreaming of this mythical destination to look squarely at what is left to her in daylight, her art. Nearly two decades have passed since my mother's suicide in 1974, years in which I have edited three books of her poetry and a book of her letters and published four novels of my own.
LGS: Mother's reputation as one of America's finest contemporary poets is secured, an authoritative biography of her life has been published, and my work as her literary executor has at last diminished to a manageable level. Nevertheless, this year may be only a resting spot along the path of my travail, on this road of mourning and celebrating my mother. Once again, I attempt to seize hold of our relationship, if just for a moment, if only here on this page, to capture it with words. This year in which I turn 40 provides me with a vista that overlooks the continuum of my motion as I have run to and from my mother, to and from myself. As I sit here today at my Word Processor, I can see both what was and what is yet before me. I become my own character, my life, this book. I address the sky and the uncharted airplane that carries a tall, dark-haired woman with a felt tip pen. Mother, are you listening? This is what I have seen and heard and learned. I am the 40-year-old Linda, and I am ready to speak back."
LGS: It took me 20 years to get to the point where I could write that chapter, and I think you can tell it's still hard to read it out loud without crying. My mother's still very much with me. Perhaps more so now that I've written the book. I think the book gave her back to me in certain ways. I thought I'd just tell you a little bit about being a literary executor because that's really been my main role in her life since she died. You see, I still talk about her like she's here. When I was 21, for my 21st birthday, mother invited me out to the house where she was living at that time. I was working for Houghton Mifflin between my junior and senior years at Harvard as a production assistant estimating the costs of books. If they'd known my mathematical abilities, I doubt they would have hired me, but they didn't discover that until it was too late. Anyway, she invited me out to the house for my birthday, and we sat in her writing room, and we had been rather estranged during those last few years, because she had gone so far downhill and was so ill and was acting out all over the place. She was just very hard to deal with. Many people withdrew in that last year of her life. And I talk in Searching for Mercy Street about how hard that is to face now, even though I knew I had no choice. It's perhaps the greatest guilt I bear.
LGS: But in any case on that day, she invited me in and I sat down and she handed me two envelopes, one thin and one fat. And in the first envelope was a beautiful letter, and I think you can tell something about the kind of letters she wrote from what I just read, and a cheque for $1,000. And I was living in an apartment with four other people, and a cheque for $1,000 was a lot of money to me. So that was my birthday present and a wonderful letter besides. And then there was this other fat envelope, and I said, "Mother, what is this?" And she said, "Open it, open it." So I opened it and it was a copy of her will, which nonplussed me, to say the least. And I said, "Great, I don't wanna look at this now." And she said, "No, no, you have to look at it now." So I opened it up and read it, 'cause she insisted, I flipped through. And I realized that she had named me her literary executor. And we had never discussed this, this is the sort of thing you ordinarily would ask someone to do, you wouldn't just put... Go ahead and put it in legal language.
LGS: And I said to her, "I don't wanna do this." And she said, "You have to." And basically explained to me her reasons why. I said Maxine Kumin, her best friend and a very well-known poet, would be a better choice. She said, "No, no, it needs to be a family member, because families and literary executors often argue. Besides, you are the perfect person." So she flattered me and I fell for it, and I said, "Okay," I would do it. And I didn't realize at the time what a position I was going to be in. If families always argue with literary executors, what happens to the family member who ends up being the literary executor? [laughter] So, I accepted this job, which really I couldn't... I mean, I couldn't quit, and once I got into it, I began to understand how complicated it actually was. I had to make a lot of different kinds of decisions and find a biographer, which was not easy to find someone who would be... Take a fairly literary approach.
LGS: I was very fortunate to uncover after some searching, Diane Middlebrook, who did a marvelous job writing a very complete life and telling the story of the life through the work, which is what I was looking for, because there were quite a number of journalists out there who wanted to make a sensational story out of our family life. So that was one of the things I had to take care of, and that was a long, hard search. And then, there was a lot of work to be done working with Diane, and I could talk at some length about this, but I think we've run out of time., so the other major thing I had to face was the question of the psychiatric tapes, which probably some of you are aware of the scandal that broke just before Diane Middlebrook's biography came out that I had allowed her to look at the tape recordings, the audio tape recordings of mother's therapy sessions.
LGS: Her first psychiatrist devised a rather ingenious device to prevent her from missing what was in her therapy sessions, because what she would do when she laid down on the couch was go into a trance and then have absolutely no recall of what they had discussed during the session. So he would tape it and then she would have to come into the office on another day and transcribe into a notebook, listen to it and transcribe notes. So, at the time she died, she had three audio tapes in her possession, as well as all the transcript notebook.,And they were all put together with her papers and her diaries and manuscript material, everything she intended to be placed in a university archive, which was another one of my jobs to inventory the material, to check it all out, to eventually find a home for it. And the only caveat I had was that it had to all go to a university library, it couldn't be broken up. But when I discovered these tapes, I was like, "Wow, she wanted these to go, but how do I feel about this?"
LGS: And I listened to them and it was very painful. But eventually, I decided that what was wonderful about the tapes was that the process of psychoanalysis is all free association. So, that's what the tapes were, they were just one endless string of free association. When mother wrote poetry, she free associated onto the typewriter and then later went back and did copious amounts of revision. But for her, the unconscious was the well spring that she tapped. So, there was a strong link often between different poems or general trends in the poetry and the therapy tapes, and I thought it would really be invaluable for a biographer and scholars to have access to these materials. So eventually, what I did was I placed them with the archive down at the University of Texas under restrictions, so that no one could see them except for the biographer until the year 2000-some odd, I don't remember exactly how far in the future it is.
LGS: And then when Diane Middlebrook went through them, I required... The biography was not an authorized biography, which means I did not have any editorial rights over what she wrote. I made everything available to her, and I decided the best way to protect the family was to find someone who would write something of great quality and taste, and then give them the opportunity to look at everything and to do what they had to do so that the book would not be viewed as being tainted by the family's perspective, which is just exactly what happened. At the time that I was working on the biography and allowing the release of the material, the Plath estate was getting very heavily accused of having withheld. There was a rumor Aurelia Plath had actually cut sections out of Sylvia's diaries. So that was kind of the model on one side, and of course, mother had raised me with the model of reveal, reveal, reveal. So if I was gonna go in any direction, it was gonna be that direction.
LGS: So, I did the best I could to protect us by finding someone terrific. And Diane did indeed prove worthy of my trust. The materials from the tapes that she eventually did quote, that was the only thing I had any control over, there I drew a line. I never once had to ask her to revise any of those quotations or take anything out. They were all very tastefully done, they all supported the points, there was nothing gratuitous about any of it. So, nevertheless, there was a scandal about it, and I came under quite a bit of criticism, but one of the things you accept as a literary executor is that you're either gonna get accused of hoarding things or you're gonna get accused of exploiting things, there's no middle ground and you can't win. So, I just accepted that as part of my job. So, that kind of tells you a little bit about what my relationship with mother was like for the last 20 years.
LGS: I'd just like to close by reading two small vignettes that are memories from the book from the time when I was a child, because I've talked a lot about what it's like to be the adult daughter of Anne Sexton, but I haven't given you any kind of a feeling for her as I was a child. This book remembers both the painful and the joyous. So the two excerpts that I'd like to read are one painful, one joyous, and they come from a chapter called First Metaphors. And the way I think of this is that there's a very deep drawer inside my mind that I can pull open at any time, reach in and pull out a snapshot. The drawer is loaded with snapshots. They're old family snapshots, probably black and white, a few colour slides. And each snapshot that I pull out brings back a memory. "Snapshots, seasons, smells and memories too, though I would like to forget it, one memory leaps up insistent as a dog. Mother calls for me to climb into her bed late on a Sunday morning to cuddle. She never gets up before 9:00 if she can help it, and daddy has nicknamed her a pad rat.
LGS: I have already been to Sunday School and back, driven by our neighbours, while mother attends St. Mattress." [laughter] Yes, you're meant to laugh there, that's good. [laughter] "This morning is like many others, mother wants to play nine. Playing nine means that I, the real nine-year-old, slide up in the bed and she slides down. She puts her head on my chest while I pat her head. "Now you be the mommy," she says, "And I'm your little girl." I comply, though unwilling. I hope this time she won't get stuck in the game and be reluctant to trade places. Often when we play nine, she scares me by refusing to be my mother again. Time passes, an hour maybe, I try to be a good mommy and take care of my little girl, but her head is so heavy like a giant's. How can I take care of a little girl when I am only nine? I try to imagine my mother is my doll. That doesn't help, and I scrinch my eyes shut to help myself not see. I'm beginning to feel as if I'm trapped underneath a truck as big as the one that comes on Mondays for our trash, as if I'm being crushed by the arm that compacts the newspapers and wire hangers.
LGS: I can feel mother's chest rising and falling against my side as I stroke her head with my hand. She's talking and talking, but I don't understand her words. "Nana," she says, "I love you Nana." I'm getting smaller and smaller with each minute. I can't breathe. Anne loves cuddling with Nana, tears thicken in my throat, I keep patting her head. "I love being nine," she says, drowsily. "It feels so good." "I'd like you to be 34," I choke out at last. "Could you be 34 now?" "Pretty soon," she promises. I am suffocating and the big tears squeeze out the corners of my tightly shut eyelids. I try to hang on to take good care of her, just like I promised God I would when he sent her home from the hospital. If I take good care of her, she will never have to go back to the hospital again. "Mommy," I plead, "Please." "No," she pouts, "I'm nine." "Please," I say, and start to sob, my chest heaving its burden up and down. "I'm nine." "Please be 34." "I can't be 34, I'm just a little girl. I'm your little girl. Don't you want me anymore?"
LGS: She twirls her hair around her finger. "Should I go live some place else?" Fear scalds me. "Please," I whisper, "I want you back." Why couldn't I just have gone out after church like my friends did to play hopscotch in the street? While the game brought comfort to my mother in its return to her early cuddles with her own Nana, to me the game aroused over and over all my fears of losing my mother. At nine, I was required to be the mother because my own mother had descended once again into child-like behavior, just as she did when she became so sick she could not take care of herself. The game was a metaphor for all that was to come, the increasingly blurred nature of our relationship, mother versus daughter, who was who? At the very back of the drawer in my mind lies another memory of cuddling, but this one fills me as I lift it out with peace. In this memory lies the luxury of rest, of love in proper proportion.
LGS: This time I am nine, and mother is indeed 34. It is a dark afternoon, late Thanksgiving day, mother and I nestled beneath the thick wool Afghan on top of the bed in Nana's bedroom. My Nana's bedroom. We are meant to be taking a nap, but as usual, we are talking, sharing what we see and feel. Without knowing it in this exchange of ideas and emotions, mother passes on to me her powers of observation. She shows me how to watch, how to see, how to record what transpires in the world around me. This is how I inherit her greatest gift. The world outside is wet, suffused with a gray light of a late rainy day. Through the large glass window, past the ivory dressing table, the two of us watch the underwater action. A pheasant struts, staccato, his tail combing the yellowing grass. The tree I have named the broccoli tree stands like a sentinel, silent and upright. It is not large, but it is sturdy and distinct.
LGS: Mother's body curls around me in warm shelter, I am utterly cocooned, I am happy. Her fingers long and lovely, trace a dance of tenderness across my face, feelings become memories, this memory becomes emblematic, the truth of that particular day. I remember the safety and warmth of that afternoon. I remember the love, sturdy as the tree, immutable as the poem she would later write to make our moment endure. She titled it The Fortress, because on that day, love did indeed build a strong wall around us. "Darling, life is not in my hands, life with its terrible changes will take you bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house, on your own land. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know, lie still with me and watch. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that." Mother, you were right, time did not take away that. Thank you.
[applause]
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RB: Linda Gray Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1953, and attended Harvard University. She is a novelist and memoirist and also literary executor for her mother, the late American poet Anne Sexton, who died in 1974. Following her mother’s death, Linda began publishing books, herself, three novels and also several memoirs, including Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to my Mother, Anne Sexton, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
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 the Toronto International Festival of Authors as well as Linda Gray Sexton. Learn more about Canada's largest book festival, and its many year-round events and programs, at FestivalOfAuthors.ca.
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives is produced by Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode was produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and graphic design by Amy Haakmat.
For more about Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. You can also listen to all 26 episodes of season one as well with interviews and readings by Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Kramer, Lee Maracle and much, much more. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA. I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of
Writers Off the Page: From the TIFA Archives.