Reading My Father: A Memoir

by Alexandra Styron Narrated by Alexandra Styron

Overview

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. From Styron's 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. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.

Editorial Reviews

MAY 2011 - AudioFile

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. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

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.)

Library Journal

Styron, who previously published the novel All the Finest Girls, has now written an intelligent and compelling memoir about her father, novelist William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner; Sophie's Choice). She portrays him as a brilliant, alcoholic, and difficult man, who was also loving, generous, and charming. She writes almost poetically about her love for him and his "flaws and failures," as well as his professional successes and triumphs. Alternating between past and present, stories of her own and her siblings' often bittersweet interactions with him, and his turbulent marriage to her mother, Rose, as well as his writing, friendships, bouts of debilitating depression, and his death, her book will make many readers eager to read or revisit William Styron's novels with a more intimate awareness of the man behind the works. The author admits that she got to understand her father more deeply in undertaking research for this book in Styron's papers at Duke University; hence her book's title. VERDICT Highly recommended for William Styron devotees and all who enjoy literary memoir and biographies. [See Prepub Alert, 10/25/10.]—Sharon Britton, Bowling Green State Univ. Lib., Huron, OH

MAY 2011 - AudioFile

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. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

William Styron's daughter recalls her love-hate relationship with the literary lion.

The author's reputation as a leading 20th-century American fiction writer made his homes in Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard lively gathering places for the country's elite authors: Peter Matthiessen, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer and many others regularly talked, argued and drank (heavily) in his living rooms. But Alexandra Styron (All the Finest Girls, 2001) is more fixated on the brooding, mercurial man who dominated and terrified her after the parties ended. By the time Alexandra was a teenager, most of her father's triumphs as a fiction writer were behind him (in a sweet passage, she recalls her blushing attempts to read the sex scenes inSophie's Choiceas a tween). Her observations focus less on his books and more on his verbal abuse of her mother and siblings, his long absences fueled by alcohol or work and his bouts with depression, which led to his acclaimed book,Darkness Visible (1990), but drained the family's emotional reserves. Perusing her father's papers, she finds reams of failed attempts to recapture the glories ofLie Down in Darkness(1951) andThe Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). Interviewing his former colleagues, she discovers a writer who was emotionally fragile even at his most successful. An official biography of Styron has already been written (James L.W. West III'sWilliam Styron: A Life, 1998), and Alexandra doesn't feel compelled to compete with it. Sometimes that's an asset: She can be brutally frank and intimate about her frustrations with her father, especially during his long decline before his death in 2006. But the book, expanded from a New Yorkeressay, also feels somewhat centerless. The author takes long leaps back and forth across time, and her attempts to integrate her own frustrations as an aspiring actress and fiction writer feel tacked-on. In the book as in her life, she struggles to assert her own personality but ultimately plays a secondary role to her father.

A tender and tragic remembrance, though mainly of interest to the author's most devoted fans.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171730284
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	04/26/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

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