READING MY FATHER
Part memoir and part elegy, Reading My Father is the story of a daughter coming to know her father at last. “A natural writer, fluid, and engaging” (The Boston Globe), Alexandra Styron grew up in Connecticut and on Martha’s Vineyard, where her family’s vibrant social life included writers, presidents, and entertainers. She was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. William Styron, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, was a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, searingly chronicled his midlife battle with major depression. “By turns brilliant and shocking” (The New York Times Book Review), Reading My Father is a tale of a daughter’s love and her own coming-of-age, beautifully written, with humor, understanding, and grace.
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, 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
“Ardent, sophisticated and entirely winning… This is a grown-up memoir taut and true.”
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“By turns brilliant and shocking… Alexandra Styron’s account of ‘the whole crazytown scene in which I raised,’ and of the slow dawning of the severity of her father’s condition, is handled with great skill.”
— James Campbell, The New York Times Book Review
“A candid, compelling account, by turns heartwarming and heartbreaking… Vividly re-creates the delights of life as the child of a cultural icon.”
— NPR.org
“A harrowing and at times darkly funny tale of towering successes… Gallant and unflinchingly honest.”
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Beautifully honest… Zigzagging through time with the finesse of a skier attacking a mogul-ridden slope. Alexandra Styron gives us a multi-dimensional, continually fascinating portrait.”
— Heller McAlpin, The Washington Post
“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
“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