Subscribe to Linda Gray Sexton's Substack: "Born Survivors"

As she moved into her mid-seventies, my Nana began to say: “getting old is hell.” And when my father reached the same point, he was wont to declare: “just take ...

Music. Music. Music. How my mother loved music of all sorts—even though she couldn’t carry a tune and never played an instrument. Can such a love run in families? Perhaps ...

A Beatles song tells us “love is all you need.” Sometimes I’m not so certain about this bold statement: I crave my work, among other things. But still, isn’t love ...

I rode the wave, rising toward its rolling crest, and then dropped down into a gulf of pain. I was thirty-one years old, and it was a pivotal date for ...

For this week’s blog, I had written a “Letter” on the subject of love, on how precious it can be, how ephemeral, and how we must rely on it in ...

My mother’s name invades my writing room: the big, black, bold ANNE SEXTON jumping off the spine of Self-Portrait In Letters, a volume I edited when I was twenty-one, immediately ...

My new home is on a river with wide sweeping views: the Rhode in Edgewater, Maryland, to be precise. Right now the water has a little chop to it, and ...

Living on the water is the height of beauty: from sunsets over a river that ripples with pink and orange while we watch from the deck; to a sky streaking ...