About Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide
- Hardcover: 300 pages
- Publisher: Counterpoint Press (January 11, 2011)
Despite experiencing the agony of witnessing her mother’s multiple suicide attempts, the last of which was successful, Linda Gray Sexton found herself gripped by the same strong tentacles of mental anguish. Falling into the familiar grooves of her mother’s relentless depression, Sexton tries once, twice, three times to kill herself—even though she is a daughter, sister, wife, and most importantly, a mother.
Sexton unsparingly describes her struggle to escape the magnetism of her mother and the undertow of depression that engulfed her life. Her powerful prose drags readers into her imperviously dark mental state. It conveys her urgent need to alleviate the internal pain, a need that becomes compulsive and considers no one.
But unlike her mother, hers is a story of triumph. 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.
Over a million people kill themselves annually–and their families, too, are prisoners of their depression and suicidal urges. Half in Love speaks for them all.
“Linda Sexton’s determination to forge an identity independent of suicide and destruction is powerful; her book is a vivid and inspiring story of living through despair and coming out the stronger for it.”–Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast, and Professor of Psychiatry, John Hopkins School of Medicine
“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.” —Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying
About 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.”
Join Linda’s community of fans and learn more about her at her official website.
Linda Gray Sexton’s TLC Book Tours TOUR STOPS:
Monday, January 17th: Savvy Verse and Wit review
Monday, January 17th: Savvy Verse and Wit – author interview
Tuesday, January 18th: Life in Review
Wednesday, January 19th: Regular Rumination
Thursday, January 20th: Book Club Classics!
Monday, January 24th: Necromancy Never Pays
Tuesday, January 25th: Colloquium – review
Tuesday, January 25th: Colloquium Guest Post
Wednesday, January 26th: She is Too Fond of Books – Guest Post
Friday, January 28th: Rundpinne
Monday, January 31st: Boarding in My Forties
Wednesday, February 2nd: The Bookworm
Wednesday, February 9th: In the Next Room
Friday, February 11th: Stuff as Dreams are Made On
Tuesday, February 15th: Red Headed Book Child
Wednesday, February 16th: Suko’s Notebook
Monday, June 6th: She Reads and Reads
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