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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 GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE.
In Reading My Father , William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind.
A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem.
From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.
In Reading My Father , William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind.
A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem.
From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April 19, 2011
43 people are currently reading
1333 people want to read
About the author
Alexandra Styron
12 books15 followersAlexandra Styron, the youngest child of Rose and William Styron, lives in New York City and Chilmark, Massachusetts. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. All the Finest Girls (2001) is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 175 reviews
November 16, 2019
Hi Everyone!
My name is Alexandra Styron, and I'll be leading you on a guided tour of my famous father's total disintegration as a human being. William Styron was a very cool and famous writer with tons of cool and famous friends! To honor his memory, I'll be skimming over his early life (and his great early books) in the most perfunctory fashion I can manage, avoiding original insights whenever possible. I'll also be name-dropping furiously, recycling mountains of used-up literary gossip, and promoting myself as the fabulous, talented, amazingly compassionate rich young white girl that I really am.
Ready? Let's begin!
When I was a little girl, Daddy was drunk all the time. Drunk and angry. Did you know that drunks make lousy fathers? Sad but true. My Daddy was really one of the worst rich white fathers in Connecticut. I think one major problem is that he was drunk all the time. Another one was that he never actually worked for a living. He said he was writing in his study, but it was usually a good ten years between books. Anyway, it was so embarrassing to have him come staggering out of his "study" every evening at dinner time and bellowing, "Albert! More wine, Albert. More wine! I've humiliated blacks, women, and Holocaust survivors enough for one day. More wine, Alphonse! More wine! General Lee can't free the slaves without more wine!" That was his idea of a joke, see. My name is Alexandra but he used to call me Al, or Albert, or whatever.
Oh, and I'm not sure, but I don't think Robert E. Lee actually freed the slaves. I think it was Ronald Reagan, or Abraham Lincoln, or some big Republican president. Daddy was always screaming about hating Reagan and the Republicans. I don't know what Ronald Reagan ever did to him. But I'm pretty sure the Republicans freed the slaves.
The thing is, in my daddy's world, facts never counted for much. That's why he made a proud, defiant black hero like Nat Turner into a sniveling coward who looked down on other blacks and secretly lusted after white women. Can you imagine that back in the Sixties some black people actually found that offensive? What a bunch of kooks.
Anyway, my childhood was rotten. Except for all the famous, glamorous, fabulous people who came over for dinner every night. Famous people are soooooo cool!!!! Did you know that it's really cool to be rich and famous? Daddy had lots of famous friends. And they all drank a lot. So that just proves that Daddy was never an alcoholic. So there!
Well, tragically enough, after getting sloppy drunk every day for forty years, my father mysteriously developed health problems. He wasn't an alcoholic, he was just depressed. Very, very depressed. This is why his later books are so difficult to read. On the other hand, once he got too old and feeble to bellow and snort all the time we kids actually liked spending time with him. We never went through his pockets for spare change, but we did clean out all the unused bathos in his unreadable later manuscripts. You never know when a bucket load of bathos will come in handy!
My father died a slow, horrible death. There was nothing funny about it. Except for all the cool famous people who kept getting in our way when we were trying to rush him to the hospital! It was sad to see him go, but with a husband, a family, and a literary career of my own -- don't laugh, I earned it all on my own by beating out dozens of other rich white girls -- I guess it's time for all of us to move on.
And so, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said while humping Maria Shriver on our back porch in Martha's Vineyard while Daddy lay passed out in a pool of his own urine still clutching a Norman Mailer voodoo doll stuffed full of pins, "Hasta La Vista, Baby!"
My name is Alexandra Styron, and I'll be leading you on a guided tour of my famous father's total disintegration as a human being. William Styron was a very cool and famous writer with tons of cool and famous friends! To honor his memory, I'll be skimming over his early life (and his great early books) in the most perfunctory fashion I can manage, avoiding original insights whenever possible. I'll also be name-dropping furiously, recycling mountains of used-up literary gossip, and promoting myself as the fabulous, talented, amazingly compassionate rich young white girl that I really am.
Ready? Let's begin!
When I was a little girl, Daddy was drunk all the time. Drunk and angry. Did you know that drunks make lousy fathers? Sad but true. My Daddy was really one of the worst rich white fathers in Connecticut. I think one major problem is that he was drunk all the time. Another one was that he never actually worked for a living. He said he was writing in his study, but it was usually a good ten years between books. Anyway, it was so embarrassing to have him come staggering out of his "study" every evening at dinner time and bellowing, "Albert! More wine, Albert. More wine! I've humiliated blacks, women, and Holocaust survivors enough for one day. More wine, Alphonse! More wine! General Lee can't free the slaves without more wine!" That was his idea of a joke, see. My name is Alexandra but he used to call me Al, or Albert, or whatever.
Oh, and I'm not sure, but I don't think Robert E. Lee actually freed the slaves. I think it was Ronald Reagan, or Abraham Lincoln, or some big Republican president. Daddy was always screaming about hating Reagan and the Republicans. I don't know what Ronald Reagan ever did to him. But I'm pretty sure the Republicans freed the slaves.
The thing is, in my daddy's world, facts never counted for much. That's why he made a proud, defiant black hero like Nat Turner into a sniveling coward who looked down on other blacks and secretly lusted after white women. Can you imagine that back in the Sixties some black people actually found that offensive? What a bunch of kooks.
Anyway, my childhood was rotten. Except for all the famous, glamorous, fabulous people who came over for dinner every night. Famous people are soooooo cool!!!! Did you know that it's really cool to be rich and famous? Daddy had lots of famous friends. And they all drank a lot. So that just proves that Daddy was never an alcoholic. So there!
Well, tragically enough, after getting sloppy drunk every day for forty years, my father mysteriously developed health problems. He wasn't an alcoholic, he was just depressed. Very, very depressed. This is why his later books are so difficult to read. On the other hand, once he got too old and feeble to bellow and snort all the time we kids actually liked spending time with him. We never went through his pockets for spare change, but we did clean out all the unused bathos in his unreadable later manuscripts. You never know when a bucket load of bathos will come in handy!
My father died a slow, horrible death. There was nothing funny about it. Except for all the cool famous people who kept getting in our way when we were trying to rush him to the hospital! It was sad to see him go, but with a husband, a family, and a literary career of my own -- don't laugh, I earned it all on my own by beating out dozens of other rich white girls -- I guess it's time for all of us to move on.
And so, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said while humping Maria Shriver on our back porch in Martha's Vineyard while Daddy lay passed out in a pool of his own urine still clutching a Norman Mailer voodoo doll stuffed full of pins, "Hasta La Vista, Baby!"
August 7, 2017
I wanted to read this book because I am a big fan of William Styron's writing. I read' Sophie's Choice' and 'Confessions of Nat Turner' and they stayed with me for a long time after reading them. When I saw that his youngest daughter, Alexandra, wrote a biography/memoir, I knew I had to read it. And as I expected, it gave a great deal of insight into the man that was her father. Ms. Styron's book was at times uncomfortable to read.. Styron was not a great parent by anyone's standards. I was outraged by her description of how her father used to scare her by telling her there were deranged escaped convicts hiding in their home. Despite the dysfunction that ruled the Styron home... (William Styron had severe depression and writes about it in his book, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness... Ms. Styron appears to be a warm, caring and introspective person. This memoir discussed just how much a person's mental illness affects the entire family and I feel she was courageous in talking about it. This book was not a typical 'air the dirty laundry' type of memoir. It was a story of a girl who went back after her father's death and tried to put the puzzle pieces of his life together. In doing this, she came to a greater acceptance and understanding of the man that was not only a successful writer and author but also her father.
August 30, 2011
I heard Alexandra Styron read from her memoir recently at The Mount in Lenox, MA (Edith Wharton's home). She's an excellent speaker and it was a riveting hour. I was therefore very much looking forward to reading her book, which I'd by chance found on the Swap Rack at my local cafe.
The first half of the book (she read the 2nd chapter) does not disappoint. Alexandra's tales of researching her father through his letters and papers housed in the collection at Duke University, along with tales of growing up with him, the stories that he told her as a child--often quite scary--are very moving. But as she journeys in prose through her own adolescence and adulthood, the book becomes more about the daughter (she's the youngest of four) and less about the father and author. As Styron's depression overtakes him for a second time, Alexandra seems particularly ill-equipped to write about it and him.
There a is a page late in the memoir where Alexandra quotes her sister Susanna from her writing on their father's death. Her sister's writing feels much more incisive and sensitive than what we've been wading through.
The second half of the book feels gossipy, unenlightened: standard growing-up memoir material (too much about boyfriends, traipsing about on Martha's Vineyard). Perhaps she needed more distance than she had at the time of this writing. A complex, depressive, sometimes hurtful man, Styron evoked complicated emotions from his daughter, and I don't feel that she fully explores these.
Am I being unfair? I can't stand it when the mother or father in a memoir is referred to as Mommy or Daddy (The Color of Water is another example)...surely the son or daughter outgrew this appellation? Maybe not. Maybe Daddy was what she called her father all his life: but does the reader need to hear it too? Daddy grates.
The first half of the book (she read the 2nd chapter) does not disappoint. Alexandra's tales of researching her father through his letters and papers housed in the collection at Duke University, along with tales of growing up with him, the stories that he told her as a child--often quite scary--are very moving. But as she journeys in prose through her own adolescence and adulthood, the book becomes more about the daughter (she's the youngest of four) and less about the father and author. As Styron's depression overtakes him for a second time, Alexandra seems particularly ill-equipped to write about it and him.
There a is a page late in the memoir where Alexandra quotes her sister Susanna from her writing on their father's death. Her sister's writing feels much more incisive and sensitive than what we've been wading through.
The second half of the book feels gossipy, unenlightened: standard growing-up memoir material (too much about boyfriends, traipsing about on Martha's Vineyard). Perhaps she needed more distance than she had at the time of this writing. A complex, depressive, sometimes hurtful man, Styron evoked complicated emotions from his daughter, and I don't feel that she fully explores these.
Am I being unfair? I can't stand it when the mother or father in a memoir is referred to as Mommy or Daddy (The Color of Water is another example)...surely the son or daughter outgrew this appellation? Maybe not. Maybe Daddy was what she called her father all his life: but does the reader need to hear it too? Daddy grates.
January 30, 2012
There are several repellent things about this memoir. First, the overwriting with Styron attempting to showcase her vocabulary and use of metaphor which clogs the flow. Second: how she surmises about characters with no real evidence to back it. Third: her snide jabs at her father, his friends, their literary and social milieu,
while simultaneously evoking a hero-worship that seems adolescent. In fact, she comes off as an adolescent, piqued with her father’s lack of interest in his family, incapable, as she admits, of appreciating her father’s talent—she doesn’t read “Sophie’s Choice” till her 30’s as she was embarrassed by the candid sexuality of the writing that she rightly sees as autobiographical. This latter, may be a reason why it’s unwise for a daughter of a man like William Styron to write what is part memoir and part biography, Primarily, what is objectionable is her affected and elaborate tone (sometimes undercut with saucy observations that seem out of place; to wit: “My father got his share of tail.”
Examples at random of her style. “What Daddy seems to have remembered best is a suffocating air of defeat about him of being foundered, for which his own overweening ambitions become a counterpoint” “Adding to the endless distractions his romance with his married lover had reached an emotional crescendo.” “Indeed, with a touch of Icarus about him, my father seemed interested almost exclusively in this kind of luminous flight.” “Daddy’s response to my sisters’ lovers was, I always thought, both refreshingly meritocratic and strangely detached. A confounding expression of both his egalitarian spirit and his raging narcissism.” I could go on, but why.
It is as if, by use of diction, substituting a ten dollar word for every nickel one, Styron hopes to convince us that she is as smart a person and as fine a writer as her father What her book actually reveals are the unresolved issues she has with him. This excerpt from the book’s concluding chapters is telling: “I was always Bill Styron’s daughter. But now he was so diminished, so frail. No one seemed to know who he was or care….But a shift was happening, a change of alignment. I was a grown woman, time was fleeting and my father’s moment was over.”
No, Alexandra. Your father’s “moment” lives on in books that far outweigh the value of this one.
while simultaneously evoking a hero-worship that seems adolescent. In fact, she comes off as an adolescent, piqued with her father’s lack of interest in his family, incapable, as she admits, of appreciating her father’s talent—she doesn’t read “Sophie’s Choice” till her 30’s as she was embarrassed by the candid sexuality of the writing that she rightly sees as autobiographical. This latter, may be a reason why it’s unwise for a daughter of a man like William Styron to write what is part memoir and part biography, Primarily, what is objectionable is her affected and elaborate tone (sometimes undercut with saucy observations that seem out of place; to wit: “My father got his share of tail.”
Examples at random of her style. “What Daddy seems to have remembered best is a suffocating air of defeat about him of being foundered, for which his own overweening ambitions become a counterpoint” “Adding to the endless distractions his romance with his married lover had reached an emotional crescendo.” “Indeed, with a touch of Icarus about him, my father seemed interested almost exclusively in this kind of luminous flight.” “Daddy’s response to my sisters’ lovers was, I always thought, both refreshingly meritocratic and strangely detached. A confounding expression of both his egalitarian spirit and his raging narcissism.” I could go on, but why.
It is as if, by use of diction, substituting a ten dollar word for every nickel one, Styron hopes to convince us that she is as smart a person and as fine a writer as her father What her book actually reveals are the unresolved issues she has with him. This excerpt from the book’s concluding chapters is telling: “I was always Bill Styron’s daughter. But now he was so diminished, so frail. No one seemed to know who he was or care….But a shift was happening, a change of alignment. I was a grown woman, time was fleeting and my father’s moment was over.”
No, Alexandra. Your father’s “moment” lives on in books that far outweigh the value of this one.
May 18, 2012
I became a fan of Styron's after reading "Sophie's Choice" and sealing the deal with "Darkness Visible". For those of us who are both book lovers and deal with chronic depression, "Darkness Visible" was and is a huge help in spreading awareness of this oft stigmatized illness. I was really excited to read this memoir. I was hoping I'd get some insight into Styron's personal life and how he dealt with recurring depression from his daughter's perspective. Instead, I just felt disappointed. It's not that Alexandra Styron doesn't write well, it's just that it seemed- as others have noted- that it lacked cohesiveness. I didn't feel invested in Alexandra's life emotionally. I don't know if this is an editing issue or not but it did feel like two different books.
While I certainly learned some details I wasn't aware of, I just didn't feel like I got what I expected. That said,I do commend Alexandra on attempting to write her truth as the daughter of both a famous writer and an emotionally distant father, at best.
I think the remedy is to read the biography that Alexandra cites quite often, "William Styron: A Life" by James L W West III.
While I certainly learned some details I wasn't aware of, I just didn't feel like I got what I expected. That said,I do commend Alexandra on attempting to write her truth as the daughter of both a famous writer and an emotionally distant father, at best.
I think the remedy is to read the biography that Alexandra cites quite often, "William Styron: A Life" by James L W West III.
August 23, 2011
Right away we're told that Daddy is difficult and don't bother him when he's writing. And that's repeated over and over again. Alexandra is the youngest child in the family by a lot so we don't hear too much about her three siblings. And her mother remains a bit of a cipher—not one meaningful interaction between the two. And Daddy just drifts through the TV room casting baleful glances at Alexandra. We hear about Alexandra's struggles to find herself (she particularly looks for herself on Martha's Vineyard) and eventually realize that she wants to become a writer like Daddy. But mostly the book consists of listing all the famous folks that Styron and wife partied with over the years and his boorish, and eventually, insane behavior. I love William Styron's four novels but found this to be a flawed, one-sided memoir and only intermittently engaging.
April 20, 2011
I agree you'd have to be a Styron fan to want to read this book. It was an uneven read and there were many places while reading it I wanted to know more or I wanted to know less.
She was obviously profoundly effected by her father's rage and moods, and perhaps it was too soon for her to write this book about their family life and her relationship with her father. It needed an editor with a more steady hand and patience to work through the material with more attention. I was disappointed and had a difficult time sticking with it in the second half of the book.
She was obviously profoundly effected by her father's rage and moods, and perhaps it was too soon for her to write this book about their family life and her relationship with her father. It needed an editor with a more steady hand and patience to work through the material with more attention. I was disappointed and had a difficult time sticking with it in the second half of the book.
January 30, 2023
I as quite looking forward to reading this but it just never quite came together for me. Started out ok with the author reading through her father’s correspondence and unfinished works and such. But eventually I grew weary of the endless name dropping, the way time bounced back and forth over decades within a couple of paragraphs, too many $10 words that served no real purpose, and, so, many, unnecessary, commas. I had a tough time finishing and wish I had the hours back.
April 30, 2014
This is a haunting and wonderful memoir of a daughter’s attempt to understand and know her father, writer William Styron, the prize winning American author of “A Tidewater Morning”, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967) and “Sophie’s Choice”.
There are four threads of content here: the author’s privileged upbringing as the child of a famous father, her career as an actress and writer and the trajectory of William Styron's life, especially the hell of his last years when he descended into full blown paranoia and madness.
Alexandra was the youngest of four children and grew up in a home which lacked little in creature comforts but was not easy to survive. Chaos and drama often enveloped the bohemian life in which she had little adult supervision. The family lived comfortably in a fifty year old Connecticut farmhouse and money was not a problem. They also had a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard and Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were all frequent visitors. There were lots of wild raucous parties and boozy dinners hosted by her beautiful mother who was wealthy, charming and very tolerant.
Alexandra's much older siblings were often away at boarding school and so escaped much of the chaos that “Albert” (as she was called by her Dad), endured growing up. In public, Styron could be charming, but at home he could be selfish, a frightening bully and a tyrant. When he was sober he tended towards melancholy and when he was drinking he tended towards violent rages. He was a gifted but complex man, a talented writer, almost obsessive in his dedication to his craft, but like many talented individuals, difficult to live with. His daily success or failure at his writing determined the mood and atmosphere in the house.
Bill Styron demanded absolute perfection in his writing and in order to focus and do this, he required complete and utter quiet. Even minor irritations were a threat to the production of his pages. No one was to interrupt and bother him, and if they did he would explode in a rage. When he did emerge from his writing room, he would careen around the house creating havoc. It was like pulling the pin on a grenade. He would just lob invective into the room, storm away and leave everything behind him in flames.
Alexandra was often left home alone with her Dad, a man who seemed to have a casual need to scare her. Other times he simply ignored her while she sat in front of the TV for hours at a time, left alone to do whatever she pleased. She worried all the time about crossing him though; avoiding her father’s wrath was often a complicated business. Styron was never an engaged parent, and at times Alexandra really hated him because of his cruelty.
Despite his heavy drinking, Styron practiced and mastered the skill of writing with a hangover. But he was also nagged by hypochondria, which constantly sank him into ruminations about multiple sclerosis, cancer and Lou Gehrig's disease. His final years were difficult not only for himself but also for the caring family supporting him. Ultimately his physical deterioration matched and later exceeded his psychological one, and it took him many years in a frail and vulnerable state before he passed from this earth.
Following her father’s death in 2006, the author tried to find and understand the father she felt she had never known. She struggled with his public persona as a charming "bon vivant" and her own personal and difficult truths. She began by researching his body of work, much of it for the first time, now collected and stored at Duke University. Putting this information together with his authorized biography, “William Styron: A Life” by James L. W. West III, written while he was still alive, she reconstructed his life and was able to fill in many of the gaps in her understanding. She complemented this with interviews with his editor and many of his closest friends. As she moved through this work, she learned about a solitary sensitive boy, the only son of elderly parents who lost his mother to breast cancer when he was only fourteen. His mother’s illness and her dying was very long and very painful. It devastated his father and the young boy had no one to help him through his sorrow. It is at this point that Alexandra began to understand the flawed man she truly loved, as she blended her father's biography with her own personal memories.
Styron was never an avid student until he found his voice as a writer at Duke University. He worked hard at what had now become his passion and published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. “Lay Down in Darkness” was praised by the critics and Styron was launched into his life as writer. However, he did not come on his writing gift easily. He struggled to produce every word and his absolute need for perfection contributed to his ultimate unraveling. Alexandra followed his time in New York and later in Paris, filling in the back stories of his personal life to his writing. In trying to understand her father, Alexandra asks: “Did his depression ultimately steal his creative gift or was it the other way round and his estrangement from his muse let him down?
Styron had probably suffered from undiagnosed depression most of his life. He had always experienced periods when melancholy followed him like a menacing black dog. But it wasn’t until 1985 when he was sixty that he sank so low and was so severely suicidal that he was admitted to a locked down hospital ward. After he left hospital, he continued with further supportive treatment but he was always running from the disease that seemed to be constantly trying to chase him down. The demons were just taking a break and returned to torment him once again when he was seventy-five. Styron wrote his well known and acclaimed book about his experience with the ravages of clinical depression in “Darkness Visible”, and some claim this is one of the most authentic chronicles of an individual's encounter with this insidious and recalcitrant disease.
During his last twenty-seven years Styron never felt good about himself, but it was certainly not due to writer’s block. Between the publication of “Sophie’s Choice” and his severe depression in the year 2000 he wrote nonfiction, essays, articles, tributes, eulogies, op-ed pieces, book reviews and introductions and afterwords for other people’s books. But the fictional novel was what he really cared about and he was never able to complete another after “Sophie’s Choice”. Great fiction was his magnificent obsession.
This is a very honest telling. The author is up front and honest about her father’s cruelties, being careful not to knock him down. At the same time she also acknowledges her own feelings which she admits could be selfish and uncaring at times. The author had the full support of her siblings and especially her mother, to tell her own story, one which is at times difficult to read. It also must have been difficult for them to allow some of the more difficult passages into print. It is a credit to them all that we have this book.
It is heartwarming to read how Alexandra finally found her father in his papers at Duke through the letters Styron wrote as a boarding school student, a soldier son, and even the funny and profane ones that came later as a writer abroad. Eventually, the landscape of the past the author shared with her father becomes clearer to her, and Alexandra leaves her difficult and painful memories where they belong—in the past.
An enjoyable read.
There are four threads of content here: the author’s privileged upbringing as the child of a famous father, her career as an actress and writer and the trajectory of William Styron's life, especially the hell of his last years when he descended into full blown paranoia and madness.
Alexandra was the youngest of four children and grew up in a home which lacked little in creature comforts but was not easy to survive. Chaos and drama often enveloped the bohemian life in which she had little adult supervision. The family lived comfortably in a fifty year old Connecticut farmhouse and money was not a problem. They also had a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard and Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein, Norman Mailer and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were all frequent visitors. There were lots of wild raucous parties and boozy dinners hosted by her beautiful mother who was wealthy, charming and very tolerant.
Alexandra's much older siblings were often away at boarding school and so escaped much of the chaos that “Albert” (as she was called by her Dad), endured growing up. In public, Styron could be charming, but at home he could be selfish, a frightening bully and a tyrant. When he was sober he tended towards melancholy and when he was drinking he tended towards violent rages. He was a gifted but complex man, a talented writer, almost obsessive in his dedication to his craft, but like many talented individuals, difficult to live with. His daily success or failure at his writing determined the mood and atmosphere in the house.
Bill Styron demanded absolute perfection in his writing and in order to focus and do this, he required complete and utter quiet. Even minor irritations were a threat to the production of his pages. No one was to interrupt and bother him, and if they did he would explode in a rage. When he did emerge from his writing room, he would careen around the house creating havoc. It was like pulling the pin on a grenade. He would just lob invective into the room, storm away and leave everything behind him in flames.
Alexandra was often left home alone with her Dad, a man who seemed to have a casual need to scare her. Other times he simply ignored her while she sat in front of the TV for hours at a time, left alone to do whatever she pleased. She worried all the time about crossing him though; avoiding her father’s wrath was often a complicated business. Styron was never an engaged parent, and at times Alexandra really hated him because of his cruelty.
Despite his heavy drinking, Styron practiced and mastered the skill of writing with a hangover. But he was also nagged by hypochondria, which constantly sank him into ruminations about multiple sclerosis, cancer and Lou Gehrig's disease. His final years were difficult not only for himself but also for the caring family supporting him. Ultimately his physical deterioration matched and later exceeded his psychological one, and it took him many years in a frail and vulnerable state before he passed from this earth.
Following her father’s death in 2006, the author tried to find and understand the father she felt she had never known. She struggled with his public persona as a charming "bon vivant" and her own personal and difficult truths. She began by researching his body of work, much of it for the first time, now collected and stored at Duke University. Putting this information together with his authorized biography, “William Styron: A Life” by James L. W. West III, written while he was still alive, she reconstructed his life and was able to fill in many of the gaps in her understanding. She complemented this with interviews with his editor and many of his closest friends. As she moved through this work, she learned about a solitary sensitive boy, the only son of elderly parents who lost his mother to breast cancer when he was only fourteen. His mother’s illness and her dying was very long and very painful. It devastated his father and the young boy had no one to help him through his sorrow. It is at this point that Alexandra began to understand the flawed man she truly loved, as she blended her father's biography with her own personal memories.
Styron was never an avid student until he found his voice as a writer at Duke University. He worked hard at what had now become his passion and published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. “Lay Down in Darkness” was praised by the critics and Styron was launched into his life as writer. However, he did not come on his writing gift easily. He struggled to produce every word and his absolute need for perfection contributed to his ultimate unraveling. Alexandra followed his time in New York and later in Paris, filling in the back stories of his personal life to his writing. In trying to understand her father, Alexandra asks: “Did his depression ultimately steal his creative gift or was it the other way round and his estrangement from his muse let him down?
Styron had probably suffered from undiagnosed depression most of his life. He had always experienced periods when melancholy followed him like a menacing black dog. But it wasn’t until 1985 when he was sixty that he sank so low and was so severely suicidal that he was admitted to a locked down hospital ward. After he left hospital, he continued with further supportive treatment but he was always running from the disease that seemed to be constantly trying to chase him down. The demons were just taking a break and returned to torment him once again when he was seventy-five. Styron wrote his well known and acclaimed book about his experience with the ravages of clinical depression in “Darkness Visible”, and some claim this is one of the most authentic chronicles of an individual's encounter with this insidious and recalcitrant disease.
During his last twenty-seven years Styron never felt good about himself, but it was certainly not due to writer’s block. Between the publication of “Sophie’s Choice” and his severe depression in the year 2000 he wrote nonfiction, essays, articles, tributes, eulogies, op-ed pieces, book reviews and introductions and afterwords for other people’s books. But the fictional novel was what he really cared about and he was never able to complete another after “Sophie’s Choice”. Great fiction was his magnificent obsession.
This is a very honest telling. The author is up front and honest about her father’s cruelties, being careful not to knock him down. At the same time she also acknowledges her own feelings which she admits could be selfish and uncaring at times. The author had the full support of her siblings and especially her mother, to tell her own story, one which is at times difficult to read. It also must have been difficult for them to allow some of the more difficult passages into print. It is a credit to them all that we have this book.
It is heartwarming to read how Alexandra finally found her father in his papers at Duke through the letters Styron wrote as a boarding school student, a soldier son, and even the funny and profane ones that came later as a writer abroad. Eventually, the landscape of the past the author shared with her father becomes clearer to her, and Alexandra leaves her difficult and painful memories where they belong—in the past.
An enjoyable read.
February 1, 2012
Ms. Styron is a gifted writer and this is a powerful book. A memoir of a daughter and a writer who must come into her own under the daunting shadow of her father's work and equally robust personality. At times heartbreaking, other times tender, but always unflinching, READING MY FATHER is a tremendous exploration of the journey to understand one's place in the world, in a family, and in the heart and minds of those who elude us even as they elude themselves.
October 28, 2011
I was disappointed. I absolutely love William Styron's Darkness Visible and was hoping for some powerful insights into his life, his mental illness, and his role as a father-- all from his daughter, Alexandra. Certainly, she tries to give all of this. But she mixes his story up so much with her own that sometimes I felt it was more about her and that the insights provided were more superficial than anything else. And the "her" she provides is not one I liked.
April 19, 2021
More of an inside look with less discretion and scenes from the rough times the Styron children (and his wife) endured than found in James West's more objective (and copious) biography. Children of writers -- maybe there should be a special prize for those who survive, or for those who survive intact. Well-written in places with touches of dark humour.
April 26, 2019
Compelling read. I found myself putting aside the rest of my plans until I finished it. It tells me what I wanted to know from a family memoir about this writer: what it was like to live with his struggle to realize his Olympic-sized literary ideas.
It made me grin to read the relatable detail that he could remember his negative reviews verbatim but barely had any recollection of the raves.
A very American life and American story.
It made me grin to read the relatable detail that he could remember his negative reviews verbatim but barely had any recollection of the raves.
A very American life and American story.
May 13, 2011
Alexandra Styron does a commendable emotional juggling act with “Reading My Father.” In this mélange of memoir and bio, she crafts a compelling portrait of her famous author dad, William, and traces the often turbulent circumstances of her upbringing and young adulthood. Managing to be frank, forgiving, and consistently self-reflective, she conveys a multi-faceted impression of a man who suffered from severe depression and hypochondria as well as who beat himself up over what he deemed his lack of productivity. On top of that though, his mighty dedication to whatever literary endeavor he was entrenched in at the time, resulted in considerable disregard and abuse for his wife and four children.
The author incorporates the echoes of her childhood perspectives plus her mature reflections as a grown woman and published novelist herself who decided to tell her father’s tale. She embarked upon research that both re-awakened her sympathies for and broadened her understanding of the man. It is a testament to her effort that the work is colored with a host of tones- rueful, respectful and loving, but also quite forthright about the damages done. Reading through the archives of his correspondence, notes, and unfinished manuscripts, she considers the confluence of actual incidents in her father’s life and his creative employment of associated details. There are warm remembrances of festive gatherings with scores of noteworthy figures in attendance, dreamy scenes of idyllic summers in Martha’s Vineyard, and crushing episodes of the darkest moods imaginable and how they took their toll on the entire family.
This is a deeply affecting book that offers a rich sense of Mr. Styron, both in his greatness and his garish misbehavior, and a moving document of a daughter’s complicated relationship to a man she alternately revered, resented and ultimately cherished.
The author incorporates the echoes of her childhood perspectives plus her mature reflections as a grown woman and published novelist herself who decided to tell her father’s tale. She embarked upon research that both re-awakened her sympathies for and broadened her understanding of the man. It is a testament to her effort that the work is colored with a host of tones- rueful, respectful and loving, but also quite forthright about the damages done. Reading through the archives of his correspondence, notes, and unfinished manuscripts, she considers the confluence of actual incidents in her father’s life and his creative employment of associated details. There are warm remembrances of festive gatherings with scores of noteworthy figures in attendance, dreamy scenes of idyllic summers in Martha’s Vineyard, and crushing episodes of the darkest moods imaginable and how they took their toll on the entire family.
This is a deeply affecting book that offers a rich sense of Mr. Styron, both in his greatness and his garish misbehavior, and a moving document of a daughter’s complicated relationship to a man she alternately revered, resented and ultimately cherished.
August 7, 2012
Positives: She's a beautiful writer; her family story is intriguing and strange; now I really want to read the entirety of William Styron's fiction.
Negatives: the memoir is exhaustingly circular. Because it does not follow a strict chronological path, it feels as if certain parts of the story are traced out again and again. I grew exhausted with the discussion of the importance of Martha's Vineyard in their lives, about the importance of certain big-name friends (it ALMOST felt like name-dropping, except, of course, that these celebrities (the Bernsteins, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, the Kennedys, etc etc) were actually their social circle; about his extraordinary success with Darkness Visible or other novels; about his relations with his father. The memoir is always building to the point of his final - and fatal - bout of depression -- but that decline is told in such detail (which hospital he was in when, etc.) that it becomes a bit of a chore. I'd have preferred broader brush strokes on this section - we just didn't need to get so caught up in all the logistic details of their family comings and goings.
And even as it felt like certain parts of the story were tread and re-tread and exhausted me, I felt as if there were other parts that were not covered well enough. I longed to hear more about her mother and her sibilings; I longed to understand better his relationship with his father, especially when he'd remarried such a horrific woman; I longed to hear more anecdotes about her childhood; I longed for it to be more about HER memories, rather than her tracing out in meticulous detail the ins and outs (some of them tedious, as I say) of her father's life and successes and tragic disintegration.
I mostly read this book because I admire Darkness Visible so much and was curious about the man behind that experience.
Negatives: the memoir is exhaustingly circular. Because it does not follow a strict chronological path, it feels as if certain parts of the story are traced out again and again. I grew exhausted with the discussion of the importance of Martha's Vineyard in their lives, about the importance of certain big-name friends (it ALMOST felt like name-dropping, except, of course, that these celebrities (the Bernsteins, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, the Kennedys, etc etc) were actually their social circle; about his extraordinary success with Darkness Visible or other novels; about his relations with his father. The memoir is always building to the point of his final - and fatal - bout of depression -- but that decline is told in such detail (which hospital he was in when, etc.) that it becomes a bit of a chore. I'd have preferred broader brush strokes on this section - we just didn't need to get so caught up in all the logistic details of their family comings and goings.
And even as it felt like certain parts of the story were tread and re-tread and exhausted me, I felt as if there were other parts that were not covered well enough. I longed to hear more about her mother and her sibilings; I longed to understand better his relationship with his father, especially when he'd remarried such a horrific woman; I longed to hear more anecdotes about her childhood; I longed for it to be more about HER memories, rather than her tracing out in meticulous detail the ins and outs (some of them tedious, as I say) of her father's life and successes and tragic disintegration.
I mostly read this book because I admire Darkness Visible so much and was curious about the man behind that experience.
May 16, 2011
I hesitated to read this, thinking it would be a version of Mommy Dearest, but that is not the case here. Ms. Styron has written an interesting, heartfelt appreciation of the writer, the man and her father, William Styron.
Like most children, she grew up knowing one side of Daddy: the sometimes funny, sometimes drunk, sometimes terrifyingly angry person living in the house. Through the Duke University archives she discovers the man, thanks to his letters to his father and others, and the writer, thanks to his drafts and other writings. The portrait painted is complex and while her daughter's point-of-view never quite disappears you can see her appreciating the sides of him she didn't know and reconciling with the Daddy she did.
This isn't a linear memoir, which works well. Styron's descent into depression in 1985 (and again in 2000) is the thread that holds her story together. I wondered if he was depressed prior to then, how much of the despair was covered by the alcohol and the rage.
One never really knows one's parents, but reading this I get the sense that Ms. Styron now knows her father better than most.
ARC provided by publisher.
Like most children, she grew up knowing one side of Daddy: the sometimes funny, sometimes drunk, sometimes terrifyingly angry person living in the house. Through the Duke University archives she discovers the man, thanks to his letters to his father and others, and the writer, thanks to his drafts and other writings. The portrait painted is complex and while her daughter's point-of-view never quite disappears you can see her appreciating the sides of him she didn't know and reconciling with the Daddy she did.
This isn't a linear memoir, which works well. Styron's descent into depression in 1985 (and again in 2000) is the thread that holds her story together. I wondered if he was depressed prior to then, how much of the despair was covered by the alcohol and the rage.
One never really knows one's parents, but reading this I get the sense that Ms. Styron now knows her father better than most.
ARC provided by publisher.
April 5, 2022
This is an exceptionally well-done memoir. The youngest daughter of award-winning author William Styron examines her growing up years in a household dominated by her unpredictable, alcoholic, brilliant writer-father. A writer herself Alexandra Styron tells a compelling story in which she comes to greater understanding of her father by reading many of his unpublished letters and papers and interviewing his contemporaries. A fascinating look into the writing process and the universal love within families.
May 26, 2011
Wonderful book. What a difficult father to have and yet ... Al is a great writer. Highly recommended
March 7, 2016
Excellent memoir from a tragically affected daughter of a depressed, tortured author.
September 17, 2011
Very interesting.
page 3-4: As it turned out, the illness wasn't finished with my father...Bill Styron had always been depressed...For many years after his '85 episode, he maintained a fragile equilibrium. But the scars were deep, and left him profoundly changed. He was stalked by feelings of guilt and shame. Several setbacks, mini major depressions, humbled him further and wore a still deeper cavity in the underpinnings of his confidence. It seems that my father's Get out of Jail Free card had been unceremoniously revoked. And though he went about his business, he'd become a man both hunted and haunted.
page 5: At times querulous and taciturn, cutting and remote, melancholy when he was sober and rageful when in his cups, he inspired fear and loathing in us a good deal more often than it feels comfortable to admit. But the same malaise that so decimated my father's equanimity when he was depressed also quelled his inner storm when he recovered. In my adult years, he became remarkably mellow. A lion in winter, he drank less and relaxed more. He showed some patience, was mild, and expressed flashes of great tenderness for his children his growing tribe of grandchildren, and, most especially, his wife.
page 53: After Pauline's death, Grandpop was in a bad state...the orchestral piece had apparently made Grandpop snap, and he'd tossed the radio to the floor...it showed a kind of sudden rage that was totally unlike Grandpop. Daddy, by contrast, behaved that way all the time. His anger often erupted without any warning, the irrationality of it as frightening as the actions that accompanied it. A toy left in his path, a pencil with no point, a departure delayed by some bit of domestic business. These were the kinds of catalysts that could suddenly pull the pin on my father's temper.
page 59: I know that my father was immensely enthusiastic about showing the book to me. His eagerness wasn't immodest, just sweet, and I marshaled my attention for his sake as well as for the nice man who was custodian of all the yellowing paper around us. I have the feeling that someone took a photograph of us standing over the scrapbook, but it might be a trick of memory. It may just have been me, making a mental photograph from a proximal distance. Famous Writer Shows Daughter Evidence of His Early Days. Daughter Feigns Interest in This and Entire, Alien, Southern Experience.
page 155: The bedlam of a sixth-grade slumber party may never have interrupted Thoreau's cogitations on Walden Pond, but we are the better, and more enlightened, for the quiet. Ad, really, where would the literature of existentialism be had Sartre ever been beckoned, by a child's small hand, to turn cartwheels on the lawn?
Whether or not my father ought to have had children is a question upon which, as a chief beneficiary of his largesse, I cannot opine. But I do think that, despite the urgency of his work, he had a deep appreciation for human connectivity..He didn't abandon us, nor, though he often behaved abominably, did he actually drive us all away. He was, for the most part, a domesticated animal. Every one of us felt, though we couldn't always point to any good evidence to support it, loved by him and strangely compelled by his outsize need. At the climax of Darkness Visible, Daddy describes the moment when he is pulled back from the third rail over which depression has hung him. Fixated on suicide, he is in the big living room in Connecticut...Through the fog of his terrible thoughts come the strains of one of his mother's favorite pieces, Brahms's Alto Rhapsody. "In a flood of swift recollection," he writes, "I though of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms...All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon."
page 178: Theoretically, Grandpop could have lived with us. We certainly had the room, though our house wasn't really suited to handicapped living. And, obviously, the means to hire nursing care was not an issue. But I think, for my father, living with Grandpop was out of the question. It would have been an anguishing echo of his childhood experience with his mother's death, which he surely had no interest in revisiting. Caring for his father full-time was simply too much of a sacrifice. He had a book to finish, and nothing took precedence over what my father needed...That said, the decision to institutionalize Grandpop weighed heavily on him. His turmoil over it, his needling guilt, was bound to find an outlet somewhere. One night, soon after Grandpop's move, I was awakened by the sound of my father shouting my name..."What kind of person are you?" he thundered..."I asked you to do one thing! One thing! I asked you to make cookies for your grandfather, but you didn't. You. Are. A. Creep!..." Eventually he stormed away...leaving me shattered...at eleven years old I wasn't much of a baker...My inconsiderate behavior was probably just an itcy thread on some larger hairy fit he was pitching. That year, with Grandpop around, he seemed especially unpredictable, his anger ever more molten.
page 179: His moods were so capricious it was hard to know what might set him off, or when. His rage could be almost laughable--I once saw him curse, chew apart, and hurl across the room a pencil that had the gall to lose its point--or it could be unexpectedly frightening. He might pass between me and the television two hundred times before turning, with no warning, and lighting into me...he's suddenly haul from the kitchen cabinet all the Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Puffs he was never around to see me eat and...angrily shove the boxes in the trash...The next day, my mother would authorize Daphne or someone to replace all the junk food and hide it in the TV room for a little while, until Daddy forgot that he gave a shit.
page 235: "The vast majority of those who do away with themselves," Daddy argued, "do not do it because of any frailty, and rarely out of impulse, but because they are in the grip of an illness that causes almost unimaginable pain."
page 238: His decision to consign Grandpop to a nursing home in his final days haunted my father. Longer than anyone, and with unflinching consistency, "Pop" had adored and admired him, offered his support and his faith. He sacrificed endlessly for his son, but Daddy couldn't do the same in return. And it tormented him. Paul Whitehurst describes his visits to the "High Ridge Care Center," delayed often by his own dread, and his father's invariable reaction.
"'Where have you been?' he'd say with unmeant reproach, which scarcely bothered me, pleased as I was at this particle of happiness, so cheaply bestowed by a son riddled with guilt. Each visit I would hope for some improvement--foolish notion. There is no sunshine in the forecast for the country of the very old. And so I'd wheel him into the elevator and out to my car, boiling with rage at his helplessness-rage that I sometimes realized, appallingly, was really a secret with for him to get it over with and die. I say that now, long after he is gone, with a shiver. Eskimos may harbor such thoughts but not college graduates in the low latitudes."
This is a fitting confession. My father could not abide suffering, not his own or anyone else's...no doubt a side effect of his youth, a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by watching his mother slowly die. In his later years, Daddy had a black Lab name Dinah, who was afflicted with a mysterious and unbearable skin condition...would rub herself along the floor in a desperate bid to scratch her bull-body itch...Daddy adored her...But...was driven to distraction by his mangy mutt's humping and snorfing,by the constant reminder of her terminal pain.
"Dinah!" he'd shout, and then for extra measure give her sore, bald hindquarters a swift, sure-footed kick. "Cut it out now!"..It was when Dinah died, followed quickly thereafter by his retriever Tashmoo, that my father began his precipitous slide into oblivion.
page 246: This thing Daddy told Bob about confidence...You can't really write without confidence. And somewhere along the line, my father lost his confidence entirely.
page 273: One day when I was talking with him, the phone rang. It was Polly...At the sound of her dulcet and vulnerable voice, my father came to life. "I'm so glad to talk to you, too, sweetie," he said, his ashen cheeks suddenly abloom. "I'm all right, better, I think...That's wonderful, what else are you doing?...When are you coming home?" I'd never before seen my father show favoritism among his children. But now it was quite plain to me that he preferred the company of some of us over others, and it stung me to my core.
page 279: Some days I just looked at my father and thought: Are you really going to die of depression?
Not suicide, which in the end is an act of mercy visited upon oneself. But depression.
page 3-4: As it turned out, the illness wasn't finished with my father...Bill Styron had always been depressed...For many years after his '85 episode, he maintained a fragile equilibrium. But the scars were deep, and left him profoundly changed. He was stalked by feelings of guilt and shame. Several setbacks, mini major depressions, humbled him further and wore a still deeper cavity in the underpinnings of his confidence. It seems that my father's Get out of Jail Free card had been unceremoniously revoked. And though he went about his business, he'd become a man both hunted and haunted.
page 5: At times querulous and taciturn, cutting and remote, melancholy when he was sober and rageful when in his cups, he inspired fear and loathing in us a good deal more often than it feels comfortable to admit. But the same malaise that so decimated my father's equanimity when he was depressed also quelled his inner storm when he recovered. In my adult years, he became remarkably mellow. A lion in winter, he drank less and relaxed more. He showed some patience, was mild, and expressed flashes of great tenderness for his children his growing tribe of grandchildren, and, most especially, his wife.
page 53: After Pauline's death, Grandpop was in a bad state...the orchestral piece had apparently made Grandpop snap, and he'd tossed the radio to the floor...it showed a kind of sudden rage that was totally unlike Grandpop. Daddy, by contrast, behaved that way all the time. His anger often erupted without any warning, the irrationality of it as frightening as the actions that accompanied it. A toy left in his path, a pencil with no point, a departure delayed by some bit of domestic business. These were the kinds of catalysts that could suddenly pull the pin on my father's temper.
page 59: I know that my father was immensely enthusiastic about showing the book to me. His eagerness wasn't immodest, just sweet, and I marshaled my attention for his sake as well as for the nice man who was custodian of all the yellowing paper around us. I have the feeling that someone took a photograph of us standing over the scrapbook, but it might be a trick of memory. It may just have been me, making a mental photograph from a proximal distance. Famous Writer Shows Daughter Evidence of His Early Days. Daughter Feigns Interest in This and Entire, Alien, Southern Experience.
page 155: The bedlam of a sixth-grade slumber party may never have interrupted Thoreau's cogitations on Walden Pond, but we are the better, and more enlightened, for the quiet. Ad, really, where would the literature of existentialism be had Sartre ever been beckoned, by a child's small hand, to turn cartwheels on the lawn?
Whether or not my father ought to have had children is a question upon which, as a chief beneficiary of his largesse, I cannot opine. But I do think that, despite the urgency of his work, he had a deep appreciation for human connectivity..He didn't abandon us, nor, though he often behaved abominably, did he actually drive us all away. He was, for the most part, a domesticated animal. Every one of us felt, though we couldn't always point to any good evidence to support it, loved by him and strangely compelled by his outsize need. At the climax of Darkness Visible, Daddy describes the moment when he is pulled back from the third rail over which depression has hung him. Fixated on suicide, he is in the big living room in Connecticut...Through the fog of his terrible thoughts come the strains of one of his mother's favorite pieces, Brahms's Alto Rhapsody. "In a flood of swift recollection," he writes, "I though of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms...All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon."
page 178: Theoretically, Grandpop could have lived with us. We certainly had the room, though our house wasn't really suited to handicapped living. And, obviously, the means to hire nursing care was not an issue. But I think, for my father, living with Grandpop was out of the question. It would have been an anguishing echo of his childhood experience with his mother's death, which he surely had no interest in revisiting. Caring for his father full-time was simply too much of a sacrifice. He had a book to finish, and nothing took precedence over what my father needed...That said, the decision to institutionalize Grandpop weighed heavily on him. His turmoil over it, his needling guilt, was bound to find an outlet somewhere. One night, soon after Grandpop's move, I was awakened by the sound of my father shouting my name..."What kind of person are you?" he thundered..."I asked you to do one thing! One thing! I asked you to make cookies for your grandfather, but you didn't. You. Are. A. Creep!..." Eventually he stormed away...leaving me shattered...at eleven years old I wasn't much of a baker...My inconsiderate behavior was probably just an itcy thread on some larger hairy fit he was pitching. That year, with Grandpop around, he seemed especially unpredictable, his anger ever more molten.
page 179: His moods were so capricious it was hard to know what might set him off, or when. His rage could be almost laughable--I once saw him curse, chew apart, and hurl across the room a pencil that had the gall to lose its point--or it could be unexpectedly frightening. He might pass between me and the television two hundred times before turning, with no warning, and lighting into me...he's suddenly haul from the kitchen cabinet all the Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Puffs he was never around to see me eat and...angrily shove the boxes in the trash...The next day, my mother would authorize Daphne or someone to replace all the junk food and hide it in the TV room for a little while, until Daddy forgot that he gave a shit.
page 235: "The vast majority of those who do away with themselves," Daddy argued, "do not do it because of any frailty, and rarely out of impulse, but because they are in the grip of an illness that causes almost unimaginable pain."
page 238: His decision to consign Grandpop to a nursing home in his final days haunted my father. Longer than anyone, and with unflinching consistency, "Pop" had adored and admired him, offered his support and his faith. He sacrificed endlessly for his son, but Daddy couldn't do the same in return. And it tormented him. Paul Whitehurst describes his visits to the "High Ridge Care Center," delayed often by his own dread, and his father's invariable reaction.
"'Where have you been?' he'd say with unmeant reproach, which scarcely bothered me, pleased as I was at this particle of happiness, so cheaply bestowed by a son riddled with guilt. Each visit I would hope for some improvement--foolish notion. There is no sunshine in the forecast for the country of the very old. And so I'd wheel him into the elevator and out to my car, boiling with rage at his helplessness-rage that I sometimes realized, appallingly, was really a secret with for him to get it over with and die. I say that now, long after he is gone, with a shiver. Eskimos may harbor such thoughts but not college graduates in the low latitudes."
This is a fitting confession. My father could not abide suffering, not his own or anyone else's...no doubt a side effect of his youth, a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder caused by watching his mother slowly die. In his later years, Daddy had a black Lab name Dinah, who was afflicted with a mysterious and unbearable skin condition...would rub herself along the floor in a desperate bid to scratch her bull-body itch...Daddy adored her...But...was driven to distraction by his mangy mutt's humping and snorfing,by the constant reminder of her terminal pain.
"Dinah!" he'd shout, and then for extra measure give her sore, bald hindquarters a swift, sure-footed kick. "Cut it out now!"..It was when Dinah died, followed quickly thereafter by his retriever Tashmoo, that my father began his precipitous slide into oblivion.
page 246: This thing Daddy told Bob about confidence...You can't really write without confidence. And somewhere along the line, my father lost his confidence entirely.
page 273: One day when I was talking with him, the phone rang. It was Polly...At the sound of her dulcet and vulnerable voice, my father came to life. "I'm so glad to talk to you, too, sweetie," he said, his ashen cheeks suddenly abloom. "I'm all right, better, I think...That's wonderful, what else are you doing?...When are you coming home?" I'd never before seen my father show favoritism among his children. But now it was quite plain to me that he preferred the company of some of us over others, and it stung me to my core.
page 279: Some days I just looked at my father and thought: Are you really going to die of depression?
Not suicide, which in the end is an act of mercy visited upon oneself. But depression.
December 9, 2022
"Why??" is the main question I had over and over while reading this book.
Overall Alexandra Styron's writing on a word, sentence, and even paragraph level isn't bad (though she could use to read Orwell's essay on writing and take his advice about not using pretentious language), but the book as a whole comes across as a collection of anachronistic anecdotes that have no central meaning in their arrangement. None of the chapters had any central thrust, any central point or theme which brought the thoughts and stories together, and she further complicates the discovery of any point by jumping around to different time periods within the chapter. For instance, chapter 13 starts off describing of how the Styron family celebrated Christmas throughout the years and her father's negative opinion of said holiday. Halfway through the chapter, she abruptly drops the Christmas theme and starts talking about her father's 60th birthday and the beginnings of his depression, and then uses that as an segue to regale her own story about a trip through Europe and her boyfriend troubles for two full pages before returning to talk more about her dad's depression. If you're telling us about your father's sour attitude toward the holidays and his subsequent mellowing, why are you now switching to describing his depression around his 60th birthday? If you're describing his depression, why in the heck are you giving us a long, detailed story about your teenage excursion with a college friend through Europe and how you used it to get back at your boyfriend?? It's not to say these quick transitions can't be made or stories must always be chronologically told, but more detail was needed to show the reader why Styron's choice of arrangement made sense.
Additionally, more detail needed to be given to certain stories, and significantly less to others. Why does she ramble on about her interactions with the doctor at Martha's Vineyard for like five sentences? Why does she talk in detail about the dog she's walking one day in Central Park? At the same time, why does she only expend one (1) matter-of-fact sentence in an already pointless story about her travels in Europe on how her parents' 70+ year-old Italian acquaintance groped her?! Again, the writing in terms of sentence structure and flow in and of itself isn't bad, but the loads of details and stories are simply never used in service of a grand character portrait or thematic goal. The book doesn't decide whether it's about her or about her father, and ends up failing at depicting both.
In sum, if you want to see a mediocre example of anachronism and complex language to see why, say, Infinite Jest is an excellent piece of literature, read this book!
Overall Alexandra Styron's writing on a word, sentence, and even paragraph level isn't bad (though she could use to read Orwell's essay on writing and take his advice about not using pretentious language), but the book as a whole comes across as a collection of anachronistic anecdotes that have no central meaning in their arrangement. None of the chapters had any central thrust, any central point or theme which brought the thoughts and stories together, and she further complicates the discovery of any point by jumping around to different time periods within the chapter. For instance, chapter 13 starts off describing of how the Styron family celebrated Christmas throughout the years and her father's negative opinion of said holiday. Halfway through the chapter, she abruptly drops the Christmas theme and starts talking about her father's 60th birthday and the beginnings of his depression, and then uses that as an segue to regale her own story about a trip through Europe and her boyfriend troubles for two full pages before returning to talk more about her dad's depression. If you're telling us about your father's sour attitude toward the holidays and his subsequent mellowing, why are you now switching to describing his depression around his 60th birthday? If you're describing his depression, why in the heck are you giving us a long, detailed story about your teenage excursion with a college friend through Europe and how you used it to get back at your boyfriend?? It's not to say these quick transitions can't be made or stories must always be chronologically told, but more detail was needed to show the reader why Styron's choice of arrangement made sense.
Additionally, more detail needed to be given to certain stories, and significantly less to others. Why does she ramble on about her interactions with the doctor at Martha's Vineyard for like five sentences? Why does she talk in detail about the dog she's walking one day in Central Park? At the same time, why does she only expend one (1) matter-of-fact sentence in an already pointless story about her travels in Europe on how her parents' 70+ year-old Italian acquaintance groped her?! Again, the writing in terms of sentence structure and flow in and of itself isn't bad, but the loads of details and stories are simply never used in service of a grand character portrait or thematic goal. The book doesn't decide whether it's about her or about her father, and ends up failing at depicting both.
In sum, if you want to see a mediocre example of anachronism and complex language to see why, say, Infinite Jest is an excellent piece of literature, read this book!
January 9, 2021
Reading My Father is a book by a talented writer about her father who is a writer himself. He is most famous for Sophie's Choice and his memoir Darkness Visible and she lived in his shadow. This book is about Alexandra Styron of growing up with a famous father who was a drinker, a womanizer, and a depressed man. Although I'm sure this was cathartic for her, it felt one sided. There was a lot about his anger, his depression, and his difficult personality. Ultimately she and her siblings along with her mother tried to guide this trouble man as he aged through psychological hospitalizations, anger, depression and more.
This author bears her soul as she writes about the pain of growing up and eventually coming to terms with her father. It was well written as far as keeping the readers attention and it is clear that she has a strong background in writing. She also attempted to do her research so she could provide facts along with her story. Still, I wish she would have told this story without dropping names of famous people. I also wish she could have made her father and ultimately her who family been more developed. It must have been too personal for her to expand on their personalities and make this book seem like more than a "tell all" by a daughter.
This author bears her soul as she writes about the pain of growing up and eventually coming to terms with her father. It was well written as far as keeping the readers attention and it is clear that she has a strong background in writing. She also attempted to do her research so she could provide facts along with her story. Still, I wish she would have told this story without dropping names of famous people. I also wish she could have made her father and ultimately her who family been more developed. It must have been too personal for her to expand on their personalities and make this book seem like more than a "tell all" by a daughter.
May 9, 2020
I give it four stars because it gets bogged down at the end. This is Alexandra Styron’s memoir/biography of her father William Styron, who wrote most notably Darkness Visible and Sophie’s Choice.
I was interested in the story because William Styron suffered from mood disorders, depression as told in Darkness Visible. He was similar in age to my father having been born in early 20th century and experiencing those war years of the 40’s and on. Though my father was not a writer he may have had an undiagnosed mood disorder. I think that was the order of the day where people were undiagnosed and untreated. There is a poignant line where Alexandra describes her father as “all untidy appetite and noisy id”(p. 158). That describes my father too who cycled through happiness and anger many times in his life.
Alexandra’s writing is consistently excellent. She delves into the archives of her father’s papers at Duke University. The reader follows her journey through the written word and the interviews she conducts with William Styron’s writer colleagues
I was interested in the story because William Styron suffered from mood disorders, depression as told in Darkness Visible. He was similar in age to my father having been born in early 20th century and experiencing those war years of the 40’s and on. Though my father was not a writer he may have had an undiagnosed mood disorder. I think that was the order of the day where people were undiagnosed and untreated. There is a poignant line where Alexandra describes her father as “all untidy appetite and noisy id”(p. 158). That describes my father too who cycled through happiness and anger many times in his life.
Alexandra’s writing is consistently excellent. She delves into the archives of her father’s papers at Duke University. The reader follows her journey through the written word and the interviews she conducts with William Styron’s writer colleagues
December 27, 2022
Alexandra Styron gives the reader a behind the scenes look at the life of her famous father William Bill Styron and how it intersected with her own. She gives us a look into his creative process, his marriage, his self-destructive behavior, his complicated, dysfunctional treatment of his family, and perhaps most interesting, his devastating battle with depression. It's a fairly detailed look at how inexact the treatment of mental illness is. The many pharmaceutical attempts at leveling patients and the bizarre, often disastrous side-effects. A modern move toward electroshock therapy. The catch-22 aspects of a mental hospital with its bland food and gray (depressing) motif entirely bereft of art. (What COULD they use for decor? One thing could lift a person's spirits, but set off an emotional explosion in another person.) This book is an excellent memoir, and quite good at describing the problems of family dynamics. Oh, and this reader quite enjoyed the many celebrities and the inside stories of their lifestyles included here.
January 11, 2024
This was not a light read, but a slogging trek through a family history. While that might make it cumbersome to some, it has a reality of the author’s perception that bring their truth to light. She has a dense vocabulary that I first considered unnecessary, but came to appreciate that her world was one of words and she offered us a lens to her island of life on the islands of the East Coast. I have not read Styron’s work, and may never do so. However I came to know him as she did, and in this colorful palette of life’s characters, I appreciated the introduction and tour. Of note, her descriptions of the grip of illness are raw and this makes it a piece that one may only be able to complete in small doses.
I read memoir not for high expectations of literary brilliance, but for the story. No one can lay claim to this story other than she, and it was hers to tell.
I read memoir not for high expectations of literary brilliance, but for the story. No one can lay claim to this story other than she, and it was hers to tell.
May 13, 2017
I found this memoir, written by William Styron's daughter Alexandra, completely fascinating. (And Alexandra Styron is herself an accomplished writer.) I've read--and loved, despite their darkness--every one of Styron's books, including "Darkness Visible," his account of his descent into suicidal depression. Styron was obviously a difficult and troubled soul (and far from ideal as a father), but his contribution to American literature is, I think, beyond measure.
July 10, 2020
I stayed up all night to read this book! The writing is gorgeous with bright images and unexpected vocabulary. Alexandra Styron is down to earth about her privileged upbringing which included major world figures, the Kennedys and more. I see her father, I hear her father, I am reminded my own Type A father who erupted.
August 9, 2023
Delving deep into her father's life and emotions, eventually his demise, Ms. Styron's account is fascinating. It took me a long time to read this book; it's difficult to read without knowing William Styron's literature. I'd love to read this account along with at least one of his somewhat autobiographical novels or famous ones.
October 4, 2022
This is a great and beautifully written look into what it's like to be the daughter of both a genius American writer and a parent who lives with mental illness. Would recommend if you love Bill Styron's work!
August 29, 2018
I feel like an ungrateful daughter, not having captured my fathers narrative as well as Alexandra has her father. Grab some tissue and have a seat, you’ll be glad you did
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