You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Diane Wood Middlebrook, the author of the recent biography of Anne Sexton,

published by Houghton Mifflin.

I'm always saying Houten.

I wanted to welcome you here, and to begin by saying that today's show is only going to circuitously

approach some of the controversy this book has generated. I'm more interested in the subject of

writing and in the example that Anne Sexton set to other writers,

and in the fact that this biographer, Diane Wood Middlebrook,

is herself a poet.

I wanted to begin by asking about, what would you call it,

the legacy of madness.

Denise Levertov famously on the occasion of the death of A. Anne Sexton talked

about Sophia Plath's death and the obligation that many young writers, particularly young women,

felt to import a certain level of madness, mania in particular, and suicidal desperation into

their lives in order to allow it to flood into the work. Could you speak a bit about that?

Yes, I think that Denise Levertoff was speaking from a teacherly point of view about the dreadful spectacle of copycat suicides or students who were acting out madness as an exhibition of creativity.

And Levertoff knows as well as anybody that creativity and madness are allied in some ways, or sometimes the effect of

breakdown is to liberate unconscious materials that are tremendously inspirational and fluent

and exciting, but to talk about the health that lies in writing for writers and to encourage

...