Two Decades Later, Linda Gray Sexton Comes to Term with Her Mother's Death

Biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook. She's written a controversial new book about the troubled writer Anne Sexton. The controversy surrounds Middlebrook's source material: she had access to transcripts of Sexton's psychiatric sessions with the approval of Sexton's daughter and psychiatrist. Sexton killed herself in 1974. She began writing poetry in 1956 following a suicidal breakdown and after her therapist suggested she try writing poetry. ("Anne Sexton: A Biography," published by Houghton Mifflin).

In her new memoir, Jong-Fast writes that her mother, Erica Jong — who penned the 1973 feminist novel Fear of Flying — had become addicted to fame and couldn't bear losing it.

Nicholson says when strangers recognize her on the street, they're never quite sure how they know her: "They might think I sold them kittens, or I work in the ice cream shop."