Alexandra Styron Gets Personal in "Reading My Father"

Alexandra Styron’s father William Styron was, as Imus put it, one of the “great literary lions” of the 20^th century. Or, as Esther Newburg described him in an effort to appeal to Imus to promote Alexandra’s book Reading My Father, William Styron was “a depressed alcoholic.”
 
If you ask Alexandra, both descriptions are accurate, though the latter depiction “reduces him to his basic parts.” Which is also kind of what she does in her book, which was not a catharsis but a journey to understanding her father, who penned classics like “Lie Down in Darkness” and “Sophie’s Choice,” and to forgiving him.
 
“He wasn’t a great father,” she told Imus. “He was present and he was sometimes a very generous figure, but he was also a terrifying figure, and he was hard on us. I think alcohol and depression played a big part in that.”
 
Reading My Father also allowed Alexandra to come to know her father “as a man,” and to “recognize and appreciate his struggle,” something for which she is very grateful.
 
Like many of his literary contemporaries—Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, James Jones—Styron lived a “complicated, big” life, Alexandra said. Most of their greatest successes came during a time when, she noted, “the novel was king, and these were the great purveyors of the novel.”
 
They were also, she added, “these big, male, hard-living, hard-drinking men” who “lived life pretty hard.” As a result, Imus pointed out, their families often paid the price.
 
“I think there’s a lot of collateral damage to that kind of life, like there is in the life of any great artist,” Alexandra said. “For hundreds of years, there have been great artists who are in the thrall of their work, and their kids pay the price.”
 
Alexandra chose carefully which scenes from her childhood to include in her memoir and which to omit, and she ultimately abandoned any scenes that did not “further the conversation and the story about who he was as an artist, and what happened to him.”
 
Styron’s career was as incredible as his fall was epic, and Alexandra admitted that while she loved her father, she didn’t always like him. “I feared him sometimes,” she said, adding, “I didn’t always know which man I was going to get—when he was great, he was really great, and when he was mean, he was really horrible.”
 
All of which prepared her well for today’s interview with the I-Man, who, while never depressed like Styron was, is a recovering alcoholic. Always seeking to create a divide where none exists, Imus wondered if Alexandra’s siblings were upset that she got to cash with the book on wacky ol’ Dad, and they did not.
 
Smiling, she replied, “They’re not writers.”
 
-Julie Kanfer