Anne Sexton: A Biography

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

One reason was her drinking. Alcohol was now Sexton's chief, self-prescribed medication, taken morning, noon, and night. In combination with loneliness, it was lethal to her art. Alcohol helped generate the curves of feeling on which her poetry lifted its wings, but it dropped her too, into depression, remorse, sleeplessness, paranoia - the normal host of furies that pursue alcoholics... She had the drunk's fluency but not the artist's cunning.

To the attraction of death was a way of coming home to Mother, finally getting her attention, was added the attraction of death as splitting off the poet once and for all, releasing her into the immortality of her words.

Plath's suicide pulled her toward the stagnant pond of her old obsession with ritualized self-destruction.

So the end of the book looked back to its opening: the dead live again in projections onto the living, which makes both the living and the dead infinitely losable.

Taking nightly sleeping pills became a ritual substitute for just such oblivion.