Interview with Linda Gray Sexton

Linda Gray Sexton is a novelist and memoirist who lives and writes in San Francisco. In 1994, she published her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, in which chronicled her experience growing up as the daughter of poet Anne Sexton. In her second memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, Sexton wrote candidly about her own battle with mental illness. Bespotted: My Family’s Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmatians, now available in paperback and hardcopy, is Linda Gray Sexton’s most recent memoir. Bespotted tells the story of Sexton and her family’s relationship with the complicated and lovable dog breed many have come to associate with a particular Disney film.

Linda Gray Sexton has been lovely enough to answer some questions about her writing and her life experiences. She is currently working on a novel. Ms. Sexton publishes a regular newsletter which can be found on her website. Please welcome her to Women Writers, Women [’s] Books!

1. Your third memoir,Bespotted: My Family’s Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmatians, Has just been released in paperback form. In Bespotted, you write about your love for a breed that many pet owners and soon-to-be pet owners don’t understand. Dalmatians are often described as “skittish,” “neurotic,” “unpredictable,” and other adjectives that I have also heard attributed to Standard Poodles, the breed my family has a love affair with. Before we begin, would you mind setting the record straight? What adjectives would you use to describe Dalmatians?

Isn’t it interesting how a particular breed of dog can get a bad reputation that just persists and persists? With Dals the problems began at the re-release of Disney’s 101, which caused a lot of impulse buying from people who knew nothing of the breed and just thought the dogs were adorable. And adorable they are—but they are also curious, smart, and stubborn. All of which meant they needed attention and couldn’t just be shoved up on a shelf like a stuffed animal.

Impulse buyers didn’t really want puppies, they wanted toys. And so we began to hear words like neurotic and skitzy applied to our dogs. The adjectives I associate most with Dalmatians are happy, energetic, adoring, affectionate, loveable, funny, companionable and—as I said before—curious, smart and stubborn.

All of which makes for a dog who wants to crawl into your lap and watch t.v. with you at night or follow you room to room during the day, who likes to nose his way into the trash when your back is turned, or beat you to your pillow at night. I have three Dals right now, and there is never any point during the day when they are not by my side. They are my constant companions.

2. You are the daughter of one of the most well-known female poets of the twentieth century. In the beginning of Bespotted, you describe a scene from your childhood in which you, your sister and your mother, Anne Sexton, watch as one of your beloved Dalmatians gives birth. You are filled with excitement, but also with terror because you know that if the puppies are not purebred Dalmatians (it is not immediately clear who the father is) they will be drowned. The birth of your family’s first litter of Dalmatian puppies inspired Anne Sexton to write her poem, “Live.” How did it feel, decades later, to give your own voice to this shared experience?

Writing about the birth of our litter of Dalmatians, born when I was thirteen, was one of the most pleasurable experiences I’ve had as a writer. That time in our life as a family was an uncertain one, with my mother teetering on the edge of mental instability. The birth of the puppies ushered in a new period for us—one wherein she celebrated life and lived to her fullest, at least for a time.

As I wrote Bespotted, I remembered the way my mother went right from the side of the whelping pen up to her typewriter, to begin the poem that would become “Live,” the centerpiece of the volume that won her the Pulitzer Prize. The memory was joyous, because the time itself was joyous. To have my mother come out from under the dark storm that always seemed to be raging above her head, to have her melt back into the warmth of our family circle and once again be more like a mother—rather than a sick woman—well, that was all my sister and I could have asked.

It was a time of great happiness, symbolized by the happiness of the pups themselves. Writing about it was enlivening and nostalgic in the best sense of the word, as well as a way of coming to recognize how many good times we shared as a family, amidst the more difficult ones that were dictated by her long-term illness.

Bespotted itself is an affirmative look at my childhood and the rest of my life as well, and I began writing it by recalling this scene of us all around the puppy box back in 1967. This particular memoir is a joyful one, and completes the circle of family “remembering” I began with Searching for Mercy Street and then continued with Half in Love. I like to think of these memoirs as a trilogy—all interwoven and illuminating each other.

3. In Bespotted, you introduce us to Gulliver, the Dalmatian that stole your heart. I’ve been told that all dog owners have that one special pup who is, in a sense, their canine soulmate. What was it about Gulliver that made him your most beloved companion?

It is hard to know whether Gulliver would have become all that he did had it not been for life circumstances that thrust him into a role of great responsibility early in his life. When he was less than a year old, my husband walked out on me and I experienced a suicidal depression. Reaching into reserves of strength one would not expect such a young dog to have at his command,

Gulliver took on comforting and caring for me the way a mother might have. On days when I was too depressed to rise from my bed, he lay with me all day, kissing away every tear, keeping me tied to life with the warm weight of his head on my shoulder. Our relationship began in this way—with him giving me so very much every day—and it never changed. He gave a lot, I gave what I could, and he was patient with me until I was able to give more back.

Over time, I grew stronger again, and returned the love and attention he’d given in abundance, though perhaps I was never really able to balance out the scale. I will always owe him more. Gulliver also brought naughty behaviors and laughter and crazy antics into my life, but there was something greater than all that about him. Some special quality that just put him over the top. I’ve lived with a lot of dogs by now, but none has ever quite approached having the same kind of intuition as Gulliver had.

Over the years, he grew to be a very wise dog, and I turned to him frequently for advice on what to do or how to handle a situation. His eyes always held the best answers. Others recognized his extraordinary gifts as well. I never got tired of hearing my friends say: “Gulliver’s “the most human dog I’ve ever met.” He was simply in tune with whoever decided to sit beside him. He was, as you say, my soul mate. We fit together, head to lap, hand to paw, mind to mind. We only had twelve years together, and I miss him every day that goes by.

4. Your first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton is, as the title indicates, about your childhood as the daughter of a woman who was brilliant, but who also struggled with and finally succumbed to mental illness. She committed suicide in 1974. In your second memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, you write openly about your own suicide attempt. You are, unfortunately, not the only child of a suicide to experience the strong urge to take your own life. Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son, committed suicide in 2009. How were you able to fight and overcome what may be an inheritable death drive?

The medical community now does recognize mental illness and the tendency toward suicide as being heritable. Bipolar illness, in particular, runs in families; even though my mother was never diagnosed as such when she first became depressed and suicidal, it is clear that she was. The disease is simply so much better understood now than it was even at the time she killed herself in 1974. If she had had available to her what I had available to me, in terms of medical knowledge and medication management possibilities, she might well be alive today.

I was very fortunate, after my second suicide attempt, to stumble into the arms of a loving, strict and tolerant psychiatrist who held my hand even as she forced me to do the necessary therapeutic work. In addition, she was expert at prescribing from the host of new psychoactive medications now available for use with bipolar disorder, the medications that ultimately saved my life. We had to be persistent, trying combinations of different drugs in differing amounts, and then I had to be tolerant of the inevitable side effects.

In the long run, I decided that it was better to gain weight and have hands that trembled a bit, than to die. Together as a team, she and I persevered through a five-year period of pure hell until I got stabilized. Then there was the long climb back into a life. Half in Love is the story of those years and that climb and it took ten years to write. Many people email me to thank me for being so candid with the story of my depression, my suicide attempts, my reentry into the world—as it helps to hear that someone else felt the way you do, and still survived. There’s a lot of hope tucked in between the pages of that book.

5. InSearching for Mercy Street you tell this poignant story about hearing your mother read “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Women,” a poem she wrote about you, at an auditorium at Harvard. You have children of your own, and I am wondering what it’s like for you when you give a reading and you know they are in the audience. Do you think back to that day at Harvard?

I can’t say that I think back to that day at Harvard specifically, because usually I am too nervous before I begin a reading to think of anything beyond staying calm! On the other hand, I did give a reading from Half in Love, a memoir about my suicide attempts and depression, when my younger son was in the audience, with a young woman he had just begun dating.

As I opened my book on the podium that night, I was worrying that perhaps he would be embarrassed when I began to read from more sensitive parts, or that she would think he came from a bizarre family. (None of my anxiety was necessary, as this past August, despite having a mother who writes openly about her personal life, my son and she married.) However, it is always hard to know your kids are out there listening to you.

You suddenly realize how many complicated feelings arise when a parent gets up in public and speaks in a candid manner about her life. After all, your lives are inextricably entangled. When I was an adolescent accompanying my mother on her reading tours, and the time came round in the repertoire for “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman,” I sometimes wanted to hide.

With that particular poem, it often seemed as if I were a science exhibit on display. (At just such a reading when I was fourteen, an older woman turned to me right after my mother had finished and said, “That’s odd. You look perfectly normal to me.” At the time I was mortified, but now the memory just seems funny in a warped sort of way.) As a mother, I want to make certain my sons feel comfortable, and yet, I am speaking sometimes on subjects about which many people feel uncomfortable.

It’s a risky position. When my children were very young I did not take them with me on readings, but as they grew older, it seemed more appropriate to allow them to attend one or two near home. And then they began to make their own decisions about whether they wanted to come along. In the long run, I reassure myself that they wouldn’t be a part of it all in public unless they admired my work and were proud to call themselves my children.

6. What are some recent memoirs you’d recommend?

I’ve been reading less memoir lately because I am working on fiction, but tossing out a few randomly from past and present: Paul Monette’s Becoming a Man, Mary Karr’s Liar’s Club and Lit, Susan Sontag’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Monica Wesolowska’s Holding Sylvan, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army, Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land, Joyce Maynard’s At Home In The World. I could go on and on—there are so many excellent memoirs available now. These are a few of my favorites from long ago, as well as a few new ones from this past year.

7. Who are some of your favorite contemporary poets?

Mary Oliver is my favorite contemporary. I don’t read as much poetry as I used to, sticking more now to fiction and memoir. But I do treat myself every day to a gift from the Academy of American Poets: when I go to my computer each morning, waiting in my inbox is a fresh poem, usually from a poet I’ve never read before, someone who has perhaps published only a volume, or perhaps only in journals. I click my mouse and presto! Here is a poem on my screen, all for free, something I get so little time with these days.  

And the voice of the poet is always fresh. On the weekends the pieces switch from being the work of “little knowns” to the work of the classics, like Longfellow or Swenson, for instance. Interestingly enough, I am much less interested in these, even when they are very famous poems. There’s something about the sense of discovery that goes hand in hand with a new voice—and all of it makes my morning cup of coffee even richer. You can sign up at poem-a-day@poets.org. I also tweet and FB all the ones I really like—paying it forward, as they say.

8. Would you mind telling us a bit about your latest project?

Currently, I am working on a novel. I haven’t tackled fiction in over twenty years, so it is a little bit frightening to find myself the driver behind this particular wheel again. However, it is liberating to be able to create whatever I please instead of trying to stick to objective truths as we do in memoir (though truth is, of course, always subjective).

I never really talk much about what a book is “about” before it is finished, but I can say that this novel deals, just as do all my books, with my obsession to understand how some human beings survive, and even go on to thrive, despite circumstances that might crush others. How does the spirit endure?

This is the question that keeps me writing, whether through the medium of my own direct experiences (as with suicide and depression), or through the experiences of the characters I simply imagine and the situations into which I set them. It’s interesting to see how the questions we pose to ourselves as writers always remain essentially the same, book to book, though the answers we may find as time goes along often change.

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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. In addition to acting as her mother’s literary executor, Ms. Sexton has written three memoirs: “Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton,” “Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide,” and “Bespotted: My Family’s Love Affair with Thirty-Eight Dalmatians.” “Rituals,” “Mirror Images,” “Points of Light,” and “Private Acts” are Sexton’s four published and widely read novels. “Points of Light” was made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame Special for television. Linda Grey Sexton is currently working on her fifth novel.

Interview by:

Emma Eden Ramos is the author of two novels and one poetry chapbook. Ramos’ novels have been reviewed in The San Francisco Book Review, The Roanoke Times and other well-known papers. Ramos’ poetry chapbook was shortlisted for the Independent Literary Award in 2011.

Tags: Anne Sexton, featured, Linda Gray Sexton, memoir, poetry, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews