Following an appointment to the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1973, Sexton completed The Death Notebooks (1974), a vivid statement of a death urge. Addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers, she despised her torpid, bloated body. She divorced Kayo with some hesitance, even though he was physically and emotionally abusive to her and their daughters. She entered McLean Hospital for treatment but left the hospital disheveled, ashen, and thin, and survived less than eleven months.
At the time of her suicide by carbon monoxide gas on October 4, 1974, in the garage of her home in Weston, Massachusetts, Sexton, wrapped in her mother's fur coat and clutching a glass of vodka, ended a troubled, chaotic life. She died just as she was emerging as a champion of self-fulfillment. At a memorial service, Adrienne Rich decried the self-indulgence of suicidal personalities; Denise Levertov noted in an obituary that Sexton had confused creativity with self-annihilation.
Sexton's personal, many-sided poems and intimate writings appeared in posthumous editions — The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), a juvenile title, The Wizard's Tears (1975), the play 45 Mercy Street (1976), Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters (1977), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978). A compendium, Complete Poems, was issued in 1981, and another, No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, in 1985.
