She was educated in public schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and at Rogers Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Lowell, Massachusetts. After a year at the Garland School, a finishing school in Boston, she eloped on 16 August 1948 with Alfred Muller "Kayo" Sexton II. After their marriage Kayo Sexton joined Ralph Harvey's wool business as a salesman. The Sextons made their home in Newton Lower Falls and in Weston, Massachusetts, and had two daughters: Linda Gray Sexton, born 1953, and Joyce Ladd Sexton, born 1956.
Shortly after the birth of her second child, Sexton began psychiatric treatment for what was initially diagnosed as a postpartum depression. She became dangerously suicidal and was hospitalized, and her children were removed from her care. Her psychiatrist encouraged her to take up writing as a way of strengthening self-esteem; her maternal grandfather had been a newspaper publisher, and literature was admired in her mother's family. Sexton found writing poetry and engaging in psychotherapy to be highly congruent activities, requiring acute responsiveness to the multivalences of language. Writing, she later explained in a lecture, "is like lying on the analyst's couch, re-enacting a private terror, and the creative mind is the analyst who gives pattern and meaning to what the persona sees as only incoherent experience."
Having little background in literature and little training as a writer, Sexton enrolled in a night-school course at the Boston Center for Adult Education in 1957, where she had the good fortune to meet the poets Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, and John Clellon Holmes.
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