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A modern writer's biography rarely commands as much public attention as this careful, exhaustive work by Stanford English professor Diane Wood Middlebrook. The subject, poet Anne Sexton, burst on the Boston literary scene in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, she held a Pulitzer Prize, a fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature and the first woman's key to the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
The vast honors conferred on Sexton focused attention on her flamboyant public persona, and on the dramatic counterpoint of her life as a suburban housewife and mother without a college education, suffering from insidious, unrelenting mental illness. Sexton's poetry, of the American genre called “confessional,” dealt explicitly with previously unacceptable issues such as women's sexuality and sexual behaviors; their ambivalence toward their children; psychiatric hospitalization and treatment; and preoccupation with death. By the time she committed suicide at the age of 45 in 1974, Sexton was a feminist heroine. She had outlived her colleague, Sylvia Plath, and had become, as well as a successful poet, an accomplished teacher, businesswoman and playwright.
The controversy surrounding this biography attests to its importance for psychoanalyst readers. Middlebrook framed her understanding of Sexton from the poet's vast medical records (generated by repeated psychiatric hospitalizations) her therapy notebooks and—the subject of most attention—office notes and four years of audiotaped sessions with her main therapist, Martin T. Orne, M.D., Ph.D. The author spent two years transcribing the tapes and, in the process, revised her original plan for the book.
Orne has been the object of scathing criticism from some of his colleagues in the American Psychiatric Association for the “breach of confidentiality” represented by his contributions to the biography