Linda Gray Sexton

Linda Gray Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1953 and graduated from Harvard University in 1975. She is the daughter of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Anne Sexton, and has edited several books of her mother's poetry and a book of her mother's letters, as well as writing a memoir about her life with her mother, "Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, Anne Sexton." "Rituals," "Mirror Images," "Points of Light," and "Private Acts" are her four published and widely read novels. "Points of Light" was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame Special for television. "Searching for Mercy Street" was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and reviewed to overwhelming critical acclaim. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described the book this way: "Powerful and affecting...a candid, often painful, depiction of a daughter's struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother. Sexton writes with compelling urgency and candor...a disturbing portrait of a mercurial, impossible and magnetic woman." Linda's second memoir, "Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide" (Counterpoint Press January 11, 2011) is about her struggle with her own mental illness and the legacy of suicide left to her by her mother, who killed herself when Sexton was twenty-one. Through the help of family, therapy and medicine, Sexton confronted deep-seated issues, outlived her mother and curbed the haunting cycle of suicide she once seemed destined to inherit. The book is a story of triumph. In pre-publication praise, Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying" and "Seducing the Demon," says, "In a country where someone commits suicide every seventeen minutes, where bipolar disorder is rampant and poorly understood, Linda Sexton's beautiful book is a cry for health and sanity. It will bring hope and understanding because it explains the way suicide blights families from generation to generation." Joyce Maynard, author of "Labor Day" and "At Home in the World," writes: "In her new memoir, Linda Sexton completes the full circle opened up with her stunning memoir, "Searching for Mercy Street"--but this time, the woman whose torment she explores is not her mother, but herself, and where her mother's story ended with despair, hers is one of survival. With brutal honesty and total lack of self-pity or sentimentality, Linda Sexton has dared to explore a subject more taboo than almost any other: not only suicide, but what comes after, for survivors. This is a book that will speak to anyone touched by the suicide of someone we knew or loved--as so many of us have been." "Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmatians," Linda's third memoir, (Counterpoint 2014) is a journey into new territory. Here, she rediscovers the more joyous aspects of her childhood through the many dogs that came into the Sexton household, and then she moves forward into her own adulthood, which is also peopled and enriched by these bespotted dogs. The book features Dalmatians, but is a true dog lover's book, with chapters that will make you laugh--and some that will make you cry. She also covers her new hobby of showing and breeding these rambunctious and companionable dogs. Her Amazon reviews have been nearly exclusively five starred, and editorial reviews have also been extremely enthusiastic. As the Los Angeles Review of Books says, "Linda Gray Sexton has added a moving and beautiful account to the shelf of books about Dogs & Their Writers...Her memoir-with-dogs is a chronicle of her deep connection to this specific breed over time. ... It must have been extremely painful to write some of these passages; to experience and re-experience the shock and the grief of the untimely and unfair endings, the vicissitudes of biology, the love that's given and received in equal measure -- here exquisitely re-imagined -- between a keeper and each of her dogs." Ellen Sussman, New York Times bestselling author of "French Lessons" and "A Wedding in Provence" proclaims: "Dog lovers, rejoice! Bespotted is part memoir, part love song to dogs, all wonderful." Each one of Linda's nine books is available on Amazon.com, and her memoirs are all in Kindle editions as well. She publishes a weekly e-newsletter, and a weekly blog post on her website, that delve into everything from the writing life, to her own ruminations and ideas, to dogs and their preoccupations. You can sign up for the e-newsletter on the home page of her website, www.lindagraysexton.com. If you would like a autographed and personalized bookplate to put on the flyleaf of any of her books, contact her via her website. She lives in California with her husband and her three Dalmatians.