Reading My Father - by Alexandra Styron (Paperback)

About the Book

"Reading My Father" is an intimate, moving, and beautifully written portrait of the novelist William Styron by his daughter, Alexandra.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

""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"

""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

"Alexandra Styron is a natural writer, fluid and engaging... A consummate guide to her father's tumultuous life. Styron fans will delight in this unique portrait of a true literary lion."--Eric Liebetrau, "Boston Globe"

"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"

"Ardent, sophisticated and entirely winning... Her touch throughout this memoir is quite fine and very sure. As tough as she is on her father, she sees clearly the better man he could sometimes be.... This is a grown-up memoir, taut and true."--Dwight Garner, "New York Times"

"By turns brilliant and shocking... Alexandra Styron's account of ... the slow dawning of the severity of her father's condition is handled with great skill."--"New York Times Book Review"

"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"

About the Author

Alexandra Styron is the author of a novel All The Finest Girls. A graduate of Barnard College and the MFA program at Columbia University, Alexandra's work has appeared in several anthologies as well as in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Avenue, Real Simple, and Interview, among other publications. She lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, New York.