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Reading My Father: A Memoir, by Alexandra Styron
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Now in paperback, the format for memoir, the story of a daughter coming to know her father at last—“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 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.
- Sales Rank: #825562 in Books
- Published on: 2012-03-06
- Released on: 2012-03-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.25" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
From 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. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* As renowned writer William Styron’s youngest child, Alexandra was often left alone with her hard-drinking and intimidating father and bore the brunt of his mercurial temperament, literary obsession, and casual psychological cruelty. The older she got, the more painfully aware she became of the deep divide between his private torments and star-studded social life as the feted author of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979). Styron himself revealed his terrible struggle with depression in his courageous memoir, Darkness Visible (1990). Alexandra’s blend of memoir and biography and forthright inquiry into her father’s inevitable date with madness tells for the first time the full story of her father’s creative triumphs and anguished failure to complete another novel before his death in 2006. Readers passionate about American literature will be fascinated by Alexandra’s insightful tales about her complicated father and his circle, which included Peter Matthiessen, Norman Mailer, and Arthur Miller. Even more affecting is Styron’s candor about how startling discoveries led her from anger to understanding as she researched and wrote this exquisitely powerful portrait of her father, a seminal writer sustained and harmed by his all-consuming artistic imperative. --Donna Seaman
Review
""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"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"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
""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"
"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"
Most helpful customer reviews
54 of 58 people found the following review helpful.
A remarkably empathetic memoir!
By TriciaTwo
Anyone who grows up as the child of a successful artist generally has quite a struggle on his or her hands, and Alexandra Styron makes no secret of her own battle to make sense of a chaotic and relatively lonely childhood. I have read a few reviews that appear to begrudge her the possession of her own life, because those reviewers seem to believe she owes some sort of silence to the preservation of her father's reputation. It's an absurd idea--almost always reserved for the daughters of famous men. No one can damage an artistic triumph by dwelling on its creator's character. But the remarkable fact is that Alexandra Styron manages to tell the truth, even at the expense of her own nostalgia, revealing a good many unpretty but terribly human traits of both her parents, without destroying the idea of them as remarkable, hard-working, achingly talented, if, perhaps, not enviable. But, surely, most people instinctively know the cost of artistic success; whole industries have been based on, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald's self-destruction. The mystery to which Alexandra Styron puts forth a tentative answer is how any artist survives--including herself.
This is surely one of the most unself-consciously written memoirs I've ever encountered, and that's simply due to the author's own talent, which I'm embarrassed to say surprised me since I knew nothing about her. I found this memoir amazingly instructive in an effort to reconcile the conflict of egomaniacal courage, confidence, and euphoria, counterbalanced in the very same person by inevitable personal doubt, miserable reflection, and occasional self-loathing. I imagine it must be common to anyone who finds that he or she has no choice but to tackle a creative imperative.
This is a splendid book! I bought it for my Kindle, but now I have to have an actual copy so that it won't ever be lost somewhere in the ethernet. Those books I must own as objects are becoming few and far between, but this is certainly one of them.
40 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
Could Alexandra Styron be a more interesting writer than her father?
By Jesse Kornbluth
Fathers who are writers and their daughters --- as a writer with a little girl in the house, I find that a fascinating topic. I should think any man who has daughters would, for it's generally understood that there is nothing more important to the development of a girl's healthy self-esteem than her relationship with her father.
And who would be more sensitive to that --- who would have more to teach us about that --- than a writer?
Then there's real life.
When a movie producer offered John Cheever $25,000 for a year's option on a novel, he rejected the offer. But it's how Cheever rejected it that was memorable --- indeed, thirty years after he told me this story, during an interview for a New York Times profile, I can still imitate his patrician honk. "My daughter wrote a book, and she got that much for six months," he told the film producer, "and she's still in the kindergarten."
Writing that, I imagined how Susan Cheever would feel about that cutting remark. Why did I leave it in? Because I was pretty sure it wasn't the first time he'd snarked at her.
John Updike was more paternal. After his death, his son David wrote: "....he was still asleep when we went to school, and was often home already when we got back. When we appeared unannounced, in his office -- on the second floor of a building he shared with a dentist, accountants and the Dolphin Restaurant -- he always seemed happy and amused to see us, stopped typing to talk and dole out some money for movies. But as soon as we were out the door, we could hear the typing resume, clattering with us down the stairs."
William Styron was also asleep when his four kids --- three girls and a boy --- went off to school. In the afternoon, when they returned home, he wasn't to be disturbed. "So it was sometimes not until he came out to prepare dinner or sharpen his pencils that I ever got a glimpse of him," Alexandra Styron writes in her memoir, "Reading My Father." At which point he might tell a story calculated to frighten his youngest daughter. Or ask her to produce a bottle of wine. Which led to a night of drinking and parental conversations on the order of "I can't stand it any more... Oh, Bill, please don't be that way....I'm leaving."
William Styron may have been a Great American Novelist --- he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and the film of his novel, Sophie's Choice, won multiple Academy Awards --- but he was not, in this account, a nurturing and supportive father. He couldn't be, really. He lived for his work. And that wasn't easy, for in addition to the monumental challenge of writing was a depression so severe he contemplated suicide and had to be hospitalized repeatedly.
Alexandra was the youngest child. Her self-appointed role was court jester: making Daddy laugh, jollying him into a decent mood. It was exhausting work, and she was no match for his despair, his drinking, his affairs --- and that's just the first tier of his flaws as a man, a husband, a father. It was, she says, "a relief" when he breathed his last.
And yet she loved him --- that's the through line of this artful, disturbing, touching memoir. She loved him for his fame, for his circle of celebrated friends, for the sweet life he provided. That is, she loved him for all the wrong reasons. But --- and here's where the book is heartbreaking and important --- she loved him for the right ones too. And this is the glory of her memoir, for as Styron falters, becomes infirm and slides toward death, she finally makes a connection with him.
The chronicle of the lost daughter and the inattentive and creepy father is the reason to read the book. That means you may be tempted to skim the first half of the book --- in those pages, she draws on her father's papers in the library at Duke University to serve up a biography of her father.
And this is a problem, for the harsh truth is that William Styron will not be remembered as a Great Writer. Oh, all his books are in print but twenty years from now the only Styron books that civilians will voluntarily choose to read are his 96-page book on depression, "Darkness Visible," and, because they saw the movie, "Sophie's Choice." The rest will be Required Reading in some American Lit classes.
It's not just Styron who will suffer this fate. Norman Mailer, James Jones --- in a world that has moved beyond macho and boozing and random sex, all those hard-drinking, big-ego writers who sought to tame the Great American Novel are doomed to be footnotes. Alexandra Styron almost makes the case for her father --- of them all, he was the least macho, the most artistic --- but nothing really can make me want to drop everything and read the 480 pages of The Confessions of Nat Turner or the 416 pages of Lie Down in Darkness or even Sophie's Choice, which is a hefty 576 pages.
"Reading My Father" comes to us in 281 pages. Many, as I say, will only appeal to those who are in the William Styron Fan Club. But the passages of a daughter reaching out to her father, not connecting, losing herself for years, drifting, choosing the wrong men and the wrong career, and then, toward the end, learning to forgive, learning how to take his hand --- yes, that's a book I care about. As would any adult who recalls a damaged childhood, as would any parents who want to do better for their kids.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
An interesting, enlightening, and often heart-rending memoir
By Bookreporter
Halfway through READING MY FATHER, Alexandra Styron discusses Daniel. Recalling a vivid memory of having played with him when she was a little girl of no more than three or four, she listens as her mother admits to her that Daniel's parents, the father being one Arthur Miller, had him institutionalized because he had Down's Syndrome. That action in and of itself is not so shocking and was generally the practice of the day. What most stunned her is that Daniel was a complete and utter secret, not even mentioned in Miller's autobiography, and that secret was kept by her father, William Styron. And it brought her to a revelation: "It affirmed my suspicion that here, among all these people who traded in great truths, keeping secrets was still the coin of the realm. And that one could spend a lifetime examining the human heart but remain personally, confoundingly, unexamined. If you were good enough at the former, the world would always forgive you the latter."
Thankfully, Styron has done a remarkable job in examining her father, a man who suffered from debilitating depression and who equally confused and frightened his children while being a beacon on the pinnacle of the literary lighthouse of his time. This is not a simple rundown of the life of William Styron, as was already set down by James West in his 1998 biography of the literary icon, but instead is a more nuanced examination, focusing on her father's writing and where he was in life at the time of those projects. It is also the story of her own attempt to try and better understand him as she examines his work, truly, for the first time.
One of her early revelations in the book pertains to her father's unfinished novel, THE WAY OF THE WARRIOR. It was the great war epic in which he was always earnestly interested. In looking through this manuscript in his collection at the Duke University library, she found the pages jumbled and out of order, some numbers used multiple times. It made no sense, these carefully worded and honed pages. Even with them properly ordered, she was more shocked to see that there was no flow, no connection. Nothing matched up. The bulk massing between 250,000 and 300,000 words, she could only think: "Was it any wonder he was depressed?" She found four other manuscripts in this fashion, and after speaking to her sister, she was left to ask: "But was he depressed, and then he couldn't write? Or was he unable to write? And it drove him completely mad."
Particularly poignant is her understanding, after so much time, that her father's depression, masterfully self-examined by the man himself in his memoir DARKNESS VISIBLE, had long been with him and was not just some event that happened. Looking back through letters and notes and unfinished drafts of books reveals that he was afflicted by great bouts of writer's block, and was pained by the inability to complete a novel during the last 27 years of his life. She also presents the torn mindset of a daughter, not just the clinical view of a scholar or investigator, when she sees the letters from other sufferers of depression who wrote to him and spoke of his compassion, which she could not reconcile with the violent-tempered and withdrawn man she knew. "How could a guy whose thoughts elicit this much pathos have been, for so many years, such a monumental a--hole to the people closest to him?"
READING MY FATHER is a sensational book. Styron's writing is clean and vivid, and thankfully she pulls no punches in her laying open the life of her father and what she and her siblings endured. She cautions against people mistaking their wealth and frequent visits from celebrities and politicians as some sort of Camelot reborn, and warns that her father is not the warm and comedic soul at the center of it all. Nor, however, does she undertake this work merely as a means to crucify his legacy. She quite simply presents him as he was: a very flawed man, and as one reads it becomes all the more clear that, despite all those flaws and the problems of her youth, Styron loves her father.
William Styron always sought that great war story. Alexandra Styron, in this interesting, enlightening and often heart-rending memoir, reveals that through the roller coaster life of his successes and failures, he fought a war every day, and the shrapnel of that war radiated out into his family. Tearing away the mask of the mythic man, she sees more that her father could have been but also finds the ability to celebrate who he was.
--- Reviewed by Stephen Hubbard
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