About this item
The Sexton family's long love affair with the Dalmatian began in Linda's childhood. There, on a snowy morning in the family home just outside Boston, LInda heard a whimpering coming from the basement. She discovered their first family dog giving birth to a litter. Witnessing the intimate act of birth had a profound effect on the family. Her mother, Anne, used the experience to complete the poem "Live," part of her third collection, titled Live or Die , which would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. For Linda, the boundless joy of both breed and breeding triggered in her a lifelong love of Dalmatians. All told, thirty-eight Dalmatians will move through her life: the ones that cheer and support her through difficulty, divorce, and depression; the ones that stay with her as she enters the world of professional breeding and showing of Dals; and, of course, the one true dog of her heart, Gulliver, her most stalwart of canine champions.
About the Author
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, (Counterpo
