Author of the week: Alexandra Styron

last updated 8 January 2015

Alexandra Styron isn’t afraid to say it, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. Her father, the titanic Southern writer William Styron, who died in 2006, could be, as she puts it, a “monumental a--hole.” Growing up the youngest of the author’s four children, Styron was taught to obey one rule above all others: “Don’t disturb Daddy when he’s working.” He “inspired fear and loathing in us a good deal more often than it feels comfortable to admit,” she writes in her new memoir, Reading My Father. Styron feels no bitterness, though. “Writing was the most important thing in his life. It undid him,” she says. As a child, she says, “I loved him and abhorred him.” As an adult, she says, “I wanted to understand him.”

Letters that her father left with Duke University opened new windows for her, said John Meroney in The Atlantic. “My father’s daily life, like most writers’, was very solitary,” she says. “But one of the discoveries I made was how many close friendships he had, and how deep they were.” Often withdrawn, even depressed, in daily life, he was warm and forthcoming in his letters. “I got lost in those papers,” she says. “It’s where I found my father.” Styron can’t help but wonder what her dad, who was prickly when she published a novel while he was alive, would think of her new project. “I’d like to think he’d be proud and flattered,” she says. “But I’m not sentimental about it or him. He might be furious at me.”