However, she added, “I am, you see, able to function. She still tires easily and “I feel extremely ill, all the time. In despair, she considered suicide, she said, but her condition slowly improved. that part of me just wasn’t there after the stroke,” Sarton said. Last year, “the hardest thing for me was that I couldn’t write poetry. Some of her most recent poems speak of “where I am now, as a woman of 75, who has really faced growing old for the first time,” she said.

Those illnesses debilitated her for nine months. In February, 1986, Sarton suffered a stroke and then learned that she has heart trouble. That takes time and energy that are difficult for her to summon now. “It’s one person right after another, (requiring) instant giving,” she said. Yet, anticipating another day of signing books and meeting admiring strangers, she said that “it’s a great thing for my readers, to meet me, and they want to tell me how my books helped them.” But she said it’s difficult for her to listen to such intimate praise while asking, “How do you spell your name?” She has, however, received 12 honorary doctorates, a Guggenheim fellowship and other awards. I’ve never won any of the (major literary) prizes,” she said. “I haven’t been spoiled by prizes or things like that. Sarton-who will be 75 on Sunday-was pleased to be celebrated. “Her books on living alone, like ‘Journal of Solitude’ have brought her another public,” Grumbach wrote, “persons who value her thoughts about dealing with solitude and loneliness and who empathize with the poet-novelist when she confesses the joys and rewards, the difficulties and pains, of the creative and solitary existence.” In her autobiographical work, Sarton described her main struggle not in the context of being female, but as “that between art and life.” But her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have a broad range and audience, encompassing the personal impacts of political events, the nature of marriages and friendships, the experiences of aging and illness, and the deaths of friends. That “openness about her feminine muse” gained her one of her loyal followings, wrote Sarton’s friend, the critic Doris Grumbach.

May sarton journals