Summary Of No One Was Surprised When Anne Sexton Chose To Die

In the original text, an article in The Boston Globe titled, “No One Was Surprised When Anne Sexton Chose to Die”, published shortly after Sexton’s suicide discussing her relationship with death, there was a commemorating and nostalgic tone I wanted to keep. I thought these specific tones were important to replicate because so much of what is written about Sexton tends to be very dry and academic, not giving insight to how creative and human she was. The article ends with describing the timeline of the day Sexton killed herself, and, although I did not want to make her suicide my main focus, I still dedicated a section to it. Simply stating that someone committed suicide leaves a lot of room for speculation and unnecessary dramatization. Going
Though Bartlett, the author, describes what Sexton was like as an adult by narrating her life from the Wednesday of the week she killed herself, to Friday, the day she died, there is only a brief mention of what her life was like growing up. The text phrases it as “a rather unhappy childhood, often telling friends in later years she felt unwanted”. During my research, I only found a few sources that went into detail about Sexton’s parents, and, though not always the case, the environment someone grows up in heavily impacts their mental health. Unlike the original text, I explicitly mentioned that Sexton was abused, and her only safe place, her aunt, was taken away from her because I wanted to show that her depression stemmed from somewhere. In terms of mental health, none of the media relating to Sexton I consumed talked about it on a scientific, objective level. They all frame it as a kind of unknown inside her that needs to be dissected. In reality, something like depression is just a chemical imbalance in the brain. Truthfully representing mental health was a top priority in my