23 Apr 2011 04:57:22
It was, as his youngest daughter, Alexandra, writes in a compelling new memoir, before Kay Jamison, Andrew Sullivan or other fellow sufferers had journeyed "back from the fresh hell of depression with any cogent field notes."
His essay drew an enormous outpouring from people whose lives had been touched by the terrible illness. Now Alexandra, herself a writer, tells what it was like to grow up in a household defined not only by her father's outsize talent, but also by his monumental self-absorption and turbulent moods.
The youngest of four children, Alexandra Styron knew never to bother her father when he was working. The whole family was so terrified of him that once, when she was just a baby and had fallen down a flight of stairs headfirst onto concrete, her older siblings waited an hour for their mother to get home to report the injury rather than bother "Daddy" while he was napping.
The elder Styron did not just suffer from the absent-minded navel-gazing one might expect of a writer. He had a mean streak, evident in the horror stories he told her, including one about a homicidal maniac who stashed his victims' remains in the attic of their rural farmhouse. Another time, he glanced up from his paper and told the little girl he called "Al" or "Albert" — a pony owner, passionate about riding — that the Connecticut governor had banned horses and theirs would have to go to the glue factory.
When Alexandra was invited to write a book about Styron after his 2006 death, she felt she had "mentally misplaced" him. What memories remained were dark and puzzling, the source of years of anger that at one point drove her into thrice-weekly psychoanalysis. She began commuting to Duke University, her father's alma mater, where his papers are housed. She interviewed his dear friend and fellow writer Peter Matthiessen and longtime editor Bob Loomis.
Her memoir, "Reading My Father," traces the arc of her father's life, from his boyhood in Tidewater, Va., to his years as a platinum-plated member of the hard-drinking, womanizing male writers' club whose defining experience was World War II.
The writing helps her methodically dismantle "the armor I'd successfully constructed against the chaos of my childhood." In the process, she discovers not only the complex origins of her father's suffering but also what he taught her, without ever meaning to, about how to live life as a writer.
