From Barnes & NobleAlexandra Styron is the daughter of major novelist William Styron (1925-2006), an author who sparked almost as many controversies as he won awards. A novelist herself, Alexandra (All the Finest Girls) knew her father not just as the literary giant Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, but also as a brilliant man tormented by alcohol-abetted depression. Her stories about growing up in the domain of her troubled father and her poet-activist mother possess an immediacy missing from author biographies.
Heller McAlpinAt the heart of Reading My Father, Alexandra Styron's beautifully honest memoir of her father…is her attempt to make sense of the discrepancy between his deeply moral novels, whose focus on man's inhumanity to man elicits so much pathos, and his egregious behavior "to the people closest to him"…Zigzagging through time with the finesse of a skier attacking a mogul-ridden slope, Alexandra Styron gives us a multi-dimensional, continually fascinating portrait of William Styron's life…
—The Washington Post
James CampbellIn recording a family history as rich and fascinating as this, as any privileged author is entitled to do, the trick is to tell the tales without seeming to be showing off.
