Reading My Father

PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, Reading My Father is the story of a daughter coming to know her father at last. “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 a daughter’s love and her own coming-of-age, 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.