Reading My Father
A Memoir
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The story of a daughter coming to know her father at last—a deeply personal literary memoir about William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and Darkness Visible—“ardent, sophisticated, and entirely winning…this is a grown-up memoir…taut and true” (The New York Times).
Part memoir and part elegy, Reading My Father is Alexandra Styron’s intimate portrait of her father, William Styron, one of the defining American novelists of the 20th century. “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 family, memory, mental illness, literary fame, and a daughter’s love, beautifully written, with humor, understanding, and grace.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The youngest daughter of the late novelist William Styron fashions a conflicted, guarded, ultimately reverential portrait of a deeply troubled artist. Dogged all his life by depression which was not diagnosed properly until the devastating 1985 episode that later prompted Darkness Visible the Virginia-born Styron was a difficult man to live with. Novelist Alexandra Styron (All the Finest Girls) delved into her father's papers at Duke University, his alma mater, to uncover the life and work of a man she never knew growing up in their Roxbury, Conn., home, along with her mother, Rose, and three older siblings. Styron was an only child whose mother died of cancer when he was 13, a Marine in World War II who never saw combat, and an abysmal student; though he was also a charming ladies' man and published his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, in 1952 at the age of 26, to great critical acclaim. The author was born just before her father finished his third novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, in 1967, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the anticipation of his next work "like a constant drumbeat under everything we did" gripped her childhood, until Sophie's Choice was published in 1979. In this intimate portrait, William Styron emerges through his daughter's eyes as a towering talent who proves all too human.
