SOURCE: "From a Cocoon of Pain," in The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992, p. 18.

[Halpern is an American novelist. In the review below, she discusses thematic and stylistic aspects of Sarton's journal Endgame.]

May Sarton, the 80-year-old author of more than 30 volumes of poetry and fiction, is perhaps best known for the journals that have chronicled her life of solitude on the coast and in the interior of New England, her passionate love for other women and her wrestle with the demons of creativity. Ms. Sarton's journals are consciously public documents. There is nothing secret about them. Her readers are real, not imagined. "I don't think this journal is very good. That is a real blow, because I had counted on it. I may be wrong, and I am correcting all the time," she writes deep into the latest volume, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-ninth Year...