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Simon and Schuster
April 2011
On Sale: April 19, 2011
304 pages ISBN: 1416591796 EAN: 9781416591795 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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.
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