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.