What a tempestuous father William Styron was. His daughter Alexandra writes of him with a clear eye: “Descendants of the so-called Lost Generation, my father and his crowd, Norman Mailer, James Jones and Irwin Shaw embraced their roles as Big Male Writers. My father’s tempestuous spirit ruled our family’s private life as surely as his eminence defined the more public one.”
Alexandra was twelve the year “Sophie’s Choice” was published. As a child she had begun to think her father did nothing but sleep all morning and spend the rest of the time stomping in and out of his study. He was a scary parent, but Alexandra could “ soothe (his) savage breast by making him laugh – and standing up to the most of his humor in kind.”
At what seemed to be the pinnacle of his success, William Styron was overwhelmed by a depression so deep it required hospitalization, about which he wrote in “Darkness Visible.” From then on he was inundated with letters from those who had gone through this terrifying illness, or watched those they loved suffer. Other breakdowns followed.
Success placed the writer and his long suffering wife, the poet Rose Burgunder, in the center of an intellectual and creative whirl. Names such as Leonard Bernstein, Peter Matheissen, and Arthur Miller appear.
Engagingly written, this memoir tells us of an artist, and what his success and his illness did to his family and his work.
[Published 2011]
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