Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
up a file that is, and I don't use this word
lightly, explosive. It really is. We're looking
at a figure who didn't just write poetry. She
effectively took a sledgehammer to the polite
silence of the 1950s domestic sphere. We're talking
about Anne Sexton. Anne Sexton. It's a name that
for a lot of people, you know, it conjures up
a very specific aesthetic. Right. The cigarette
smoke, the martini glass, the typewriter. And
this absolute refusal to look away from the dark.
Yeah, the darkness. She's a monumental figure,
but I feel like she's often misunderstood or
maybe just... flattened into this one -dimensional
tragic figure. I think that's exactly right.
And that's a real disservice to the work and
to the life, as complicated as it was. Exactly.
And I think for the average person or even the
casual reader, the knowledge stops at confessional
poet or maybe Sylvia Plath's friend. But we have
a stack of sources here, biographies, literary
criticism, details on the controversies that
erupted after her death. And they tell a much,
much wilder story. Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're
talking about a woman who went from being a suburban
housewife. And a literal fashion model. Right.
A fashion model. People forget that part. To
a Pulitzer Prize winner who fronted a jazz rock
band. It's a jarring trajectory. It sounds almost
like fiction when you lay it all out like that.
It really does. And she did all of this while
battling severe, often untreated or poorly treated
mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder.
And that's a key point. We have to be careful
not to define her solely by. The illness. Yes.
Even though the illness, as we'll see, defines
so much of her work and her life. It's the central
tension of her story, isn't it? The creativity
and the illness being so intertwined. And that
is really the core of our mission today. We want
to understand this woman who was once told by
a priest, God is in your typewriter. What a line.
It's such a heavy charge to put on someone. A
blessing and a curse, maybe. Yeah. But we also
have to navigate the dark reality of her biography
because her story raises some massive ethical
questions. It does. It forces us to ask about
the price of privacy. I mean, when an artist
decides that their life, and by extension the
lives of their family members, is their raw material,
what are the consequences? That's the question.
We often celebrate the bravery of the confession.
But rarely do we look at the collateral damage
of that confession. Right. And we are going to
get into the really thorny stuff later. The release
of confidential therapy tapes, the allegations
of abuse. It gets incredibly complicated. Very.
But let's start at the beginning. Because before
she was Anne Sexton, the tortured poet, she was
just Anne Grey Harvey. And on paper, her early
life looked... Well, it looked picture perfect,
didn't it? On the surface, absolutely. She was
born in 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts. OK, so
for those not familiar with New England geography,
Newton is. What does that signify? It's upper
middle class. It's respectable. Her father, Ralph
Churchill Harvey, was a successful wool merchant.
So we're talking about a world of country clubs
and expectations, a very specific, very buttoned
up world. It's that classic mid -century American
stability, the white picket fence dream. Exactly
that. And she follows the path that was laid
out for a young woman of her station at that
time. She goes to boarding school at Rogers Hall
in Lowell, Massachusetts. Right. Then she does
a stint at a place called Garland School. And
you have to understand, these were institutions
designed to polish young women. They were effectively
preparing them for the marriage market. So the
curriculum wasn't about finding your voice. No,
it was about finding a husband. It was about
learning to be a good hostess, to run a household.
That was the career path. And she had the currency
for that market. Our sources all emphasize she
was stunningly beautiful. And this detail that
jumped out at me is that she actually worked
as a model for the Heart Agency in Boston. That
is a crucial detail. It's not just trivia. It
emphasizes that she knew how to present a facade.
She knew how to be looked at. She understood
the power of image, the power of a pose. And
she follows that script perfectly for a while.
She elopes in 1948, marrying Alfred Cayo Sexton
II. She is only 20 years old. So young. Very
young. And she just starts checking all the boxes.
Marriage, check. Children, check. She has her
first daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953, and
her second. Joyce led Sexton in 1955. Right.
So if you were looking at her life from the outside
in, say, 1955, you would see the ultimate success
story of the era, a beautiful home in the suburbs,
a husband, two healthy kids, the American dream.
But internally. But internally, the wheels were
already coming off. And this is where the story
pivots so dramatically. It seems that motherhood
was the catalyst or at least the match that lit
the fuse of her illness. Which is a terrifying
thought considering the era. We're talking about
the mid -50s. You weren't supposed to be unhappy
about being a mother. It was supposed to be the
ultimate fulfillment. Exactly. You were supposed
to be grateful and content. But we know now,
looking back, that she suffered from severe postpartum
depression, which likely triggered her underlying
bipolar disorder. But back then, the terminology
wasn't there, was it? no not at all it was just
viewed as nerves or instability or you know female
hysteria her first manic episode hits in 1954.
then after her second daughter is born in 1955
a second major episode hits and this one is worse
much worse it gets bad enough that she is hospitalized
at glenside hospital she's suicidal her family
doesn't know what to do with her and this is
the moment that changes literary history it's
almost cinematic she's in the hospital presumably
at her lowest point, and she meets a man named
Dr. Martin Orne. Dr. Orne. He is a central character
in this story, and a controversial one. He is
both a hero and a villain, depending on which
chapter we're in. Right, we'll definitely get
to that later. But in 1955, he is the catalyst.
He doesn't just give her pills or shock therapy,
he gives her an assignment, he sees something
in her, some way she's processing her trauma,
and he specifically encourages her... To write
poetry. I want to pause on that because it's
so counterintuitive. Usually we think of writing
as a career choice. I want to be a writer. But
for Sexton, it wasn't career advice. No, it was
a prescription. It was medicine. He wasn't saying,
and you have a gift, go get famous. He was using
writing as a therapeutic tool. So it was a way
to. Like to organize the chaos. Exactly. To organize
the chaos in her mind. It was a way for her to
externalize the internal horror so she could
look at it, give it a shape, and maybe, just
maybe, manage it. She was transitioning from
a patient struggling with madness to a student
of the craft. But it wasn't an easy transition,
was it? I mean, she didn't just pick up a pen
and become a confident poet overnight. Far from
it. She was incredibly insecure. There's a great
anecdote about her wanting to join her very first
poetry workshop, which was led by a man named
John Holmes. Okay. She was so filled with great
trepidation, as one biography puts it, that she
couldn't even pick up the phone to register.
Wow. She made a friend call for her, and it gets
even more poignant. She then made that same friend
drive her to the first class and literally walk
her into the room. She was that terrified of
being exposed as a fraud, as just a housewife
playing at art. It makes her so human. We see
the Pulitzer winner later, this icon of strength,
and here she is just terrified to walk into a
classroom. It's a powerful image, but once she
got in there... Once she got in, she was hooked.
She was. And she learned from the best. She eventually
ends up at Boston University studying under the
titan of mid -century poetry, Robert Lowell.
And this is the class. If you could go back in
a time machine to any poetry workshop. This is
the one you'd pick. Because look at who is sitting
in the desks next to her. Sylvia Plath and George
Starbuck. It is the legendary class. You have
Sexton and Plath. Two women who would come to
define this new raw genre, sitting in the same
room, workshopping each other's poems. They were
at the absolute epicenter of what would become
the confessional movement. Let's drill down into
that term confessional because it gets thrown
around a lot. Sometimes almost as a slur, right?
Implying it's just oversharing or diary entries
set to line breaks. Yes, it's often used dismissively.
But in the context of the late 50s and early
60s, this was revolutionary stuff. It was earth
shattering. Set the scene for us. What was poetry
supposed to be like back then? Well, the prevailing
style was high modernism. Think T .S. Eliot.
Poetry was supposed to be intellectual, detached,
objective, full of allusions to Greek myths and
obscure history. Deeply impersonal. It was about
broad cultural commentary. It was not about your
body. It was not about your kitchen or your messy
divorce or your time in a mental hospital. That
was considered vulgar, unseemly. And then comes
Anne Sexton writing about, well, give us a list.
What was she putting on the page? Okay, here's
the list. Menstruation. abortion, masturbation,
incest, adultery, drug addiction, the messy secret
realities of a woman's life. Even saying those
words now on a show like this feels a little
heavy. In 1960, in a book of poetry from a major
publisher, That must have been nuclear. It was.
Her best friend, the poet Maxine Kuhman, put
it perfectly. She said these topics were proprieties
embraced by none. They were considered obscene,
especially for a woman to be writing about. Why
especially for a woman? Because a woman's job
was to be the angel in the house, a famous phrase
from a Victorian poem. She was supposed to be
pure, selfless, and silent about the unpleasantries
of life. Her role was to uphold the facade, not
to talk about the blood and the mess of biology
and psychology. So sex had really ripped the
veil. off. Her first book comes out in 1960.
And just look at the title, To Bedlam and Part
Way Back. She is putting her institutionalization
right on the cover. Bedlam is another word for
madness, for the asylum. She is saying, I have
been to the place you all fear, the place you
whisper about, and I have returned to tell you
what it's like. She's reclaiming the experience.
Exactly. She's refusing to hide it in the attic
like some family secret. She's making it the
subject of her art. And inside that book, you
have Poems like Her Kind. I feel like this is
the entry point for so many readers, the poem
everyone knows. It is seminal. It's her anthem.
She uses the metaphor of the witch. I have gone
out, a possessed witch. I have been her kind.
What's she doing there with that witch imagery?
She is taking the figure of the witch, the outcast,
the dangerous woman, the one society persecutes
for being different or powerful, and she is aligning
herself with it. She's saying, that's me. I am
the woman who doesn't fit. It is an act of solidarity
with every woman who has ever been called too
much or hysterical or crazy. It's an incredibly
powerful statement of identity. It's a reclamation
of a slur. She also wrote the double image, which
hits closer to home. It explores the mother daughter
relationship, but specifically the guilt of separation.
Yes. That poem was written after one of her hospitalizations
when her young daughter had to go live with her
mother in law because Anne was too sick to care
for her. Wow. And the poem deals with this incredible
guilt, but also with generational trauma. It
questions whether this disease of sadness is
passed down from mother to daughter like an inheritance.
It's raw and unflinching in a way that just hadn't
really been done before in poetry. And speaking
of trauma and connection, we have to talk about
Sylvia's death. This was written after Plath
died by suicide in 1963. They were friends, but
also rivals. It's a very complicated relationship,
but the poem is a raw, painful homage. It's not
just a simple elegy or mourning. Sexton talks
about the tangled threads of their shared depression.
There's a darkness in that poem that goes beyond
just grief. There is. There's almost a sense
of envy in the poem that Plath had finally achieved
the death they had both been courting. It's a
very dark, very honest look at suicidal ideation
as a shared bond. They used to talk about suicide
over martinis at the Ritz -Carlton bar. It was
their common language. It's chilling. It is.
But despite, or maybe because of this darkness,
the literary world rewarded her. She starts out
a bit conventional in her style, but our sources
say she quickly learns to roughen up her line.
What does that mean to roughen up her line? It
means she stopped trying to be so formal. She
stopped trying to write like the men, like Robert
Lowell. She found her own voice, which was more
direct, more visceral. She weaponized language
against the palatess, the polite facade of society.
And it worked. It worked. By 1967, she wins the
Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection,
Live or Die. That is the pinnacle. That's the
top of the mountain. It absolutely is. She isn't
just a housewife poet from the suburbs anymore.
She's not an amateur. She's one of them. Now,
I want to shatter the image of the lonely artist,
you know, suffering alone in the garret. Sexton
didn't work in isolation. You mentioned her friends,
and it seems like she had a whole creative ecosystem
around her. She did. She was very connected.
And she needed those connections to survive,
I think. First, there was W .D. Snodgrass. He
was an established poet who became a kind of
mentor. She met him at the Antioch Writers Conference
in 1957. And he wrote a poem that unlocked something
for her, right? Yes. His poem is called Heart's
Needle. And it was about Snodgrass being separated
from his young daughter after a divorce. So it
was personal. Very personal. And when Sexton
read that, it was a revelation. It was like a
light bulb went on. validated her own experience
as a subject for high art. If a man could write
about missing his child and be praised for it,
so could she. It gave her permission to use her
own life without apology. That's a huge moment.
But the most important relationship in her creative
life has to be Maxine Kuhman. Without a doubt.
They met in that very first workshop, the one
she was scared to even enter. And they just clicked.
Instantly. Kuhman was the steadying force to
Sexton's chaos. They were so close, they had
a dedicated phone line installed between their
houses. A private line. A dedicated creative
hotline in the 1960s. That is commitment. I love
that detail. It was their lifeline. They would
stay on the phone for hours, sometimes just working
in silence with the line open just to know the
other was there. Other times, reading drafts
back and forth. They rigorously critiqued each
other's work. So it wasn't just a friendship,
it was a professional partnership. A deep one.
They even collaborated on four children's books
together. Kuhman was there for every step, every
crisis, every triumph. It was a partnership of
survival as much as it was about art. And Sixson
was also expanding what poetry could even look
like. This is the part of her story that always
surprises me. The band. Her kind. A jazz rock
group she formed in the late 60s. She performed
her poetry to music. It's so rock and roll. I
mean, can you imagine a Pulitzer Prize winning
poet, a suburban mother, fronting a band. It
shows she wanted to be visceral. She wasn't satisfied
with just the quiet words on a page. No, she
was a performer. The sources all agree she was
incredibly charismatic. She had a stage presence.
She wanted to be seen and heard. And the band
was another way to do that, to get the Palms
out into the world in a different way. And she
kept experimenting with the writing, too. In
1971, she publishes a book called Transformations.
Yes, and this is a really interesting shift.
She moves away from pure autobiography for a
bit. She takes Grimm's fairy tale stories we
all know, like Snow White and Cinderella, and
she retells. them with a dark modern feminist
twist what do you mean by that Well, it's what
critics now call revisionary retelling. She stripped
the fairy tales of their saccharine happily ever
after endings and exposed the brutal gender dynamics
underneath. The passive princesses, the predatory
men. She saw the horror that was already there
and just amplified it. So she's at the height
of her powers. She's won the Pulitzer. She has
the band. She's writing plays. Her play Mercy
Street was produced. Yes. Starring Marion Selds.
She was a major literary figure. But the darkness
we talked about. about at the beginning it never
went away the bipolar disorder was a constant
companion and as we move into the late 60s and
early 70s things start to deteriorate what happened
alcohol becomes a major factor she was drinking
heavily and some critics started to notice a
change in the work some of the reviews became
more negative they called it preening lazy and
flip so they felt the discipline was slipping
that the craft wasn't as sharp some did Others
saw it as a deliberate stylistic choice, a new
phase, a rejection of niceness in her poetry.
But there's no denying that the suffering was
immense. The mania and the depression were cycling
faster and faster. And this leads to another
one of those incredible stories that seems to
define her life. It's about the title of one
of her last books, The Awful Rowing Toward God.
It's an incredible title. It comes from a meeting
with a priest. Yes. During a particularly bad
crisis, she went to see a Roman Catholic priest.
She was suicidal and she asked him to administer
the last rites. And he refused. He refused because
she wasn't physically dying. But he said something
to her that stuck. He looked at her, this tormented
artist, and he said, God is in your typewriter.
That phrase again. It seems to be the anchor
of her entire creative life. It gave her the
will to live just a little bit longer, just long
enough to get the words out. It gave her a mission.
And she wrote the first draft of that book, The
Awful Rowing, in 20 days. 20 days? 20 days. She
said herself that she took two days out for despair
and three days out in a mental hospital. But
otherwise, she just wrote. She wrote. She was
rowing against the tide of her own chemistry.
And sadly, on October 4th, 1974. The rowing stopped.
It did. The details of that day are just haunting
because of how mundane they were, how normal.
She had lunch with Maxine Kuhlman. She had lunch
with her best friend. They were working. They
were revising the galleys for the awful rowing
toward God. Just two friends doing the work they
loved. One source says they had tuna melts and
vodka. And then she goes home. She takes off
her rings. She puts on her mother's old fur coat.
She pours herself a glass of vodka. She goes
into the garage. gets into her car and turns
the engine on. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Yes.
She was 45 years old. 45. It's incredibly young.
And the reaction from the literary world was
huge, as you'd expect. But there was also a warning
note in some of the eulogies, wasn't there? There
was. The poet Denise Levertov said something
crucial. She said, we who are alive must make
clear, as she could not, the distinction between
creativity and self -destruction. What do you
think she meant by that? I think she was pushing
back against the romantic myth of the tortured
artist. She was saying, we shouldn't glamorize
the illness that killed her. We have to separate
the art from the tragedy. The art is brilliant,
but the suicide is just a tragedy. It's not a
creative act. A really important distinction
to make. Now, usually when a famous person dies,
the story kind of settles. It becomes fixed.
But with Anne Sexton, the death was really just
the beginning of a whole new storm. It really
was. This is where we get into what's known as
the posthumous controversy. And this is where
it gets legally and ethically messy. Very messy.
In 1991, 17 years after her death, a biographer
named Diane Middlebrook publishes Anne Sexton,
a biography. And it caused an absolute firestorm.
And the fuel for that fire came from an unlikely
source. It came from Dr. Martin Orne. The same
doctor who encouraged her to write poetry in
the first place. Yes. For the biography, Dr.
Oren gave Middlebrook something unprecedented.
He gave her access to the tape recordings of
his therapy sessions with Sexton. Wait. Just
to stop right there. Doctor -patient confidentiality.
How is that even possible? That is the golden
rule of medicine. It was a massive, massive breach
of ethics. The New York Times reported thunderous
condemnation from the medical and psychiatric
community. So how did he justify it? What was
his reasoning? His justification was that Sexton
herself had given him permission to do whatever
he thought would help others understand her illness
and her work. He argued that she viewed herself
as a kind of case study for the world, that she
wanted her pain to be used for a greater good.
But the family, they must have had to agree.
Linda Gray Sexton, her daughter and the literary
executor of her estate, did approve it. And that's
another layer of complication. Okay, so what
was on those tapes that was so explosive? It
wasn't just poetry talk. No. The tapes, and by
extension the biography, revealed a side of Sexton
the public had never seen. It revealed that she
could be physically violent toward her daughters.
It detailed physical altercations with her husband.
It painted a picture of a household filled with
chaos and rage. So a much darker picture than
just a woman struggling internally. Yes. But
the most shocking allegations came not from the
tapes, but from her daughter, Linda Grace Sexton
herself. Linda wrote her own memoir, right? searching
for mercy street yes in 1994 a few years after
the biography and in that book she detailed being
sexually assaulted by her mother this changes
everything this is a seismic shift in how we
see her we go from seeing sexton primarily as
a victim of her own mind to seeing her as a perpetrator
of abuse it complicates the narrative immensely
and it tore the family apart Other relatives
wrote op -eds. They disputed the portrayals in
the biography and in Linda's book, calling it
a distortion of the truth. It became a very public,
very painful family feud. And Dr. Orne himself
had some... let's say, controversial theories
about her behavior, didn't he? Yeah. Based on
those therapy sessions. He did. And this gets
into the whole false memory debate that was raging
in the 80s and 90s. Okay, what do you mean? Well,
Owen used some pretty aggressive therapeutic
techniques, including hypnosis and sodium pentothal,
what people call truth serum. Right. And he claimed
that under hypnosis, a separate personality named
Elizabeth emerged in Sexton. He also came to
believe and allegedly suggested to Sexton that
she had been abused by her own father as a child.
But the family disputed that. Vigorously. Her
mother, her aunts, they all denied it completely.
They said it never happened. So where did the
idea come from? That's the question. Oren himself
later admitted that adults under hypnosis don't
literally replay childhood events. He said they
view childhood through the prisms of adulthood.
He eventually concluded that she was suffering
from hysteria and was highly suggestible, meaning
she might have created these memories to please
him, the therapist. So we have a situation where
the therapist who released the confidential tapes
is also using techniques that are now considered
highly unreliable and may have even planted the
ideas himself. It is a hall of mirrors. It is
a complete ethical morass. And to add one final
layer of tragedy and professional malpractice
to the story, there were allegations of an affair.
Not with Warren. No. With her second therapist,
the one who replaced Orne, he's given a pseudonym
in the biography, Ali Zweizum, but was later
identified in the press as a Dr. Frederick J.
Dull. And she had an affair with him. Her own
therapist. The biography alleges that she did.
And Dr. Orne, her first therapist, actually believed
that this affair, this massive boundary violation
by her second doctor, was the final catalyst
for her suicide. He believed it destroyed her
last anchor to stability. It is just tragedy
upon tragedy. Malpractice, illness. Abuse, suicide.
It is so hard to reconcile all of this with the
beautiful, powerful poetry. It is hard. But that
is the task, I think, for anyone who reads her
work now. We have to hold two truths at once.
Anne Sexton was a brilliant, groundbreaking artist
who gave a voice to female pain like no one before
her. And she was a deeply, profoundly troubled
woman who caused significant lasting harm to
the people closest to her. Both things can be
true. Her legacy, though, despite all the controversy,
is undeniable. I mean, look at pop culture. Her
influence is still felt. Oh, absolutely. The
musician Peter Gabriel wrote the song Mercy Street
for her. It's on his huge album, so it's directly
inspired by her poem 45 Mercy Street. And Morrissey
from the Smiths cites her as a personal touchstone.
Her fingerprints are all over the place. She
created a permission structure for artists to
talk about the self, about mental health, about
trauma. And physically, she is still part of
Boston. She's on the Boston Women's Heritage
Trail. She's commemorated. She opened the door.
Every memoirist who writes about their struggles
with mental health today, every songwriter, every
poet who turns the lens inward, they all owe
a debt to Anne Sexton. She took the stigma and
put it under a spotlight. So as we wrap up this
deep dive, how do we synthesize this? How do
we put a frame around this incredibly complex
life and legacy? I think we have to accept the
complexity. We can't simplify her into just a
hero or just a villain. She shattered the silence.
She proved that a woman's domestic interior life
was worthy of high art. But she also showed us
the destructive power of untreated or poorly
treated mental illness, both for the person suffering
and for everyone around them. It brings me back
to that question you raised at the very beginning,
the cost of this kind of confessional art. And
that's the thought I really want to leave you
with. When a writer decides, my life is my material.
They're making a unilateral decision for everyone
in their life, their children, their spouses,
their parents. They all become characters in
the story, often without their consent. And when
the writer is gone, the story and the trauma
that may come with it lives on in the people
who are left behind. Exactly. Does the brilliance
of the work survive the tragedy of the life?
Does it excuse the harm inflicted? There is no
easy answer to that. I don't think there is one.
But it is a question we have to ask every time
we read a poem or a book that claims to be a
confession. A tough question, but a necessary
one. If you're listening, go read Her Kind or
listen to Peter Gabriel's Mercy Street after
this. You might hear it with new ears. Thanks
for joining us on this deep dive into Anne Sexton.