Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide is Linda Gray Sexton's heartfelt and emotional memoir.
Her mother was famous poet Anne Sexton. Linda is a successful writer herself and the prose in her memoir is achingly beautiful.
Linda's mother Anne suffered from severe depression and as a child she was witness to her mother's mental illness. Linda was twenty one years old in 1974 when her mother committed suicide, after several attempts.
She loved her mother greatly, but Linda swore that she would not take on her mother's legacy of suicide and depression. She went on to marry and have children and become a writer. Throughout her life, Linda battled severe depression. As much as she fought it, her depression would return again and again.

Linda's memoir is intensely personal and emotional, and when I was done reading, I almost felt like I wanted to give her a hug. She shares her battle with depression and certain things she talks about are heart wrenching. Her pain comes right off the pages.
I was curious to read Linda's memoir because I wanted to hear her take on suicide and depression. She shares her story here in a brave and insightful way.

Linda describes her suicide attempts as almost being beyond her control. Her depression was something she could not control or will away as much as she tried to.

When Linda describes her first suicide attempt and how she was thinking about how she promised her children she would never do such a thing to herself as her mother had done, she brought tears to my eyes.

After battling years of lingering depression and taking endless medications and going to therapy, Linda comes out a stronger person and gets some closure with her friends and family.

Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide is a moving and beautifully written memoir that is not to be missed. ( )

Linda Gray Sexton, an author of memoir and fiction, tackles the issues of depression, suicide, and family legacies in her latest memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. In case you haven’t deduced on your own who her famous mother is, it is Anne Sexton one of the greatest American confessional poets, who successfully committed suicide in October 1974 after battling depression for years by locking herself in the garage and dying from carbon monoxide poisoning.

“The other families in our neighborhood looked nothing like my own family. My father did not run the family, nor did my mother. It was my mother’s illness that had seized control. My adulation of her was not tempered by the fact that she was mentally ill. We never used the word ‘crazy’ — though when the ambulance arrived in the driveway to take her away, the neighborhood children whispered that Mrs. Sexton was nuts again.” (page 59)

Half in Love is far from an easy read as Linda details not only her mother’s struggles with depression and suicide, but also the violent and sometimes inappropriate relationships within the family. The legacy of suicide is clear as Linda discusses her college years, her marriage, and the birth of her children. The “rabbit hole” is often used to describe the downward spiral Linda and her mother descend into without necessarily being triggered by a specific event. Some of the details about institutionalization, attempts at suicide are detailed and will make readers turn away from the page, but they are necessary to convey the depth at which these women fell away from the real world into the darkness that obscured their reasons for hope.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/01/half-in-love-by-linda-gray-sexton.html ( )

Just like her mother before her (the Pulitzer prize winning poet Anne Sexton), Linda Gray Sexton's work explores her deeply personal pain. Linda's memoir tenderly describes what it was like to grow up in the midst of her mother's depression. Her mother's story ends when she ends her own life. However, as she deals with the aftermath of her mother suicide, Linda's struggle with mental illness only then takes root. Despite Linda's best efforts to rage against her mother's legacy and lose her pain in work, marriage and motherhood, she eventually succumbs to her own clinical depression and thoughts of suicide.

Linda is both a daughter held hostage by her mothers illness, and a mother holding her family in the grips of her own. Powerful, honest, and disturbing, Half in Love gracefully explores depression and suicide from inside the eye of the storm. ( )