Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook

This was a national bestseller when it came out in 1991.

It really is a very good book. Ever since my "Sylvia Plath phase," I have wanted to read a biography of Anne Sexton.

It leaves me wondering about the values people choose to praise.

I think the moment Anne Sexton surprised her loyal and faithful husband for a divorce encapsulated about all one needs to know about her. She proudly admitted to being an addict: addicted to alcohol and prescribed medication.

She was born in 1928. She committed suicide in 1974. Forty-six years old. "A middle-aged witch" [Chapter 17] at age 42 (1970).

She was forty-one years old in 1969. I graduated from high school in the spring of 1969. From p. 321 in the biography:

In 1969 it seemed harder than ever to to be parents of teenagers [Anne and her husband Kayo had two young teenage daughters, Linda and Joy]. [The Pill was approved by the FDA in the early 1960s; its use spread rapidly in the late part of that decade, generating an enormous social impact. Time Magazine placed the pill on its cover in April, 1967.  -- wikipedia] Suddenly, even in the suburbs, everyone was in drug trouble, if marijuana was the drug in question (letters indicate that Anne too sneaked a joint now and then during Kayo's absence; he loudly disapproved of pot). The point wasn't so much the drugs, though, as the "drug culture," which made parents lose their bearings. Nineteen sixty-nine was the year of Woodstock; albums by Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Doors, prescribing sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, were hard to get away from. These new media stars were white, middle-class young people with good educations who had seemingly evolved in a single generation into sleek, charismatic animals of a new breed. Their music surged into suburban homes and, like a tide lifting all the boats, made parents worry about what their own children were up to. Sexton reported that her daughter Linda had "fallen in love with a hippy with long, long hair. What do I say? I'm kind of a hippy myself." Should Linda go on the pill? If she smoked, shouldn't she pay for her own cigarettes? 

But this is what Linda saw. Their parents felt routines were very important for the family, and dinner as a family was an important routine. The parents "banned" Linda and Joy from the kitchen while dinner was being prepared. Anne and Kayo were sloshed on martinis by the time dinner was served at eight or nine o'clock. "Daddy would open a small package of frozen peas, maybe bake those small boiling potatoes, one apiece -- no salad, no desert. Mother would gag down a drumstick. She was hardly able to swallow anything solid; she'd often get up from the table and vomit her food."  One night she fell face first into mashed potatoes at the dinner table.

According to Middlebrook, "the dearth of food had nothing to do with the Sextons' financial situation, as during those same years they ordered champagne by the case." And then Middlebrook tries to rationalize the reason for the dearth of food. The bottom line was that both parents were alcoholics.

And then folks wonder how "Woodstock generation" could have come about.