READING MY FATHER: A MEMOIR
by Alexandra Styron

Praise & Reviews

“Alexandra Styron’s account of her father is clear-eyed, frightening, and compassionate: an often lyrical view of Styron’s struggle with despair, writing, and living. She is unsentimental about the toll his depression and alcoholism took on his work, and even less sentimental about the damage it did to his family. William Styron was a great writer and complex person; his daughter does him justice.”
– Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., Professor of Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and author of An Unquiet Mind and Nothing Was the Same

“Reading My Father is the memoir of a childhood in an intellectually glittering, artistically engaged and emotionally precarious household. In this portrait, by turns tender and unsparing, we meet William Styron, the charming bon vivant undone by depression, the gifted and prolific writer whose long struggle to finish his final novel may have imperiled his sanity. Fluid and fascinating, dark and funny, Alexandra Styron’s book brings her father before us in all of his complexity, a literary lion, roaring his way through America’s post-war landscape.”
– Geraldine Brooks, author of March and People of the Book

“A gene has been passed from father to daughter. Alexandra Styron, a born writer, tells the story of her father and the price he and his wife and children paid for his gift. Hers is a shocking book, painful in its truthfulness and moving in the love that holds this remarkable family together as depression and darkness claim the great man who is the center of their lives.”
– Mike Nichols

“With great sympathy and bracing humor, Alexandra Styron tells the story of the development and maturation of William Styron’s singular artistic talent, and of the tragic drowning of that talent–and of the man himself–in an inexorable tide of chronic depression. Reading My Father is a beautiful, utterly absorbing portrait of the artist, and moving proof of how his youngest daughter grew up to become a writer who would make her father proud.”
– John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and Reservation Road

“William Styron’s autobiographical writings were both candid and withholding, and this penetrating memoir shines light on what they left out; it does so with tenderness and compassion. This would be a bracing examination of the father-daughter relationship even if its suffering hero were not famous.”
– Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon