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Anne Sexton was forty-five in 1974, the year she asphyxiated herself in her bright red Mercury Cougar in the closed garage of her home.
Controversial in life, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet became more controversial in death. Her older daughter and literary executor, Linda Gray Sexton, who was twenty-one when her mother committed suicide, requested that Martin Orne, the psychiatrist who treated Sexton from 1956 through 1964, turn over to Diane Wood Middlebrook three hundred hours of audiotapes he had made of his patient's therapy sessions. Linda Gray Sexton, who has edited her mother's books, then allowed Middlebrook to use psychiatric material from the tapes and psychiatric records from hospitals in her biography of the poet. With the family's permission, Orne cooperated fully with Middlebrook, who interviewed him for a total of eighty hours. Orne even wrote a foreword to the biography in which he referred to the soul-searching that had gone into his decision to give the audiotapes to his patient's family.
The publication of Anne Sexton: A Biography (Middlebrook 1991) created a literary sensation as well as an unprecedented and sensational psychiatric controversy, one that shows no signs of abating, as Dawn Skorczewski demonstrates in her excellent scholarly book An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton. Played out in the New York Times on the front page (Stanley 1991), on the op-ed page (Orne 1991), and in the letters column, as well as in professional journals and other publications, the controversy over the propriety of Orne's having turned the tapes over to Middlebrook has never reached a resolution. In general, mental health professionals excoriated Orne, accusing him of acting unethically, while many humanities scholars believed the contribution the tapes make to understanding the sources of Sexton's poetry outweighs concerns about the breach of confidentiality. Because the disclosure had been authorized by Sexton's executor, there was little q