Reading My Father

When you first hear Alexandra Styron's monotone reading of her memoir about growing up the youngest child of the towering novelist William Styron, you might inwardly groan about another non-professional reader. But quickly you realize that the studied detachment in her delivery is no deficiency on her part but an exact auditory counterpart to the emotional pitch she sets for herself as writer of this brave book. Styron the daughter never succumbs to sentimentality; she wants to understand this gigantic, deeply troubled man whose moodiness, indifference, and casual cruelties dominated and cowed his household even as he wrote some of the twentieth century's most luminous novels. By the end, you recognize that the detachment has been a conceit necessary to enable the daughter to look clear-eyed and compassionately at the father she loved despite all. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

January 24, 2011
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.