Reading My Father: A Memoir

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.

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.