Reading My Father : A Memoir
by Alexandra Styron

I should have taken this book back to the library the day it was due. Now I have to pay a fine and it's certainly not worth the price. I struggled to finish the last forty pages.
Alexandra Styron attempts to write about her father when she barely knew the man. She was the youngest of the family (always called "the Baby") and didn't know about her father's early successes with his first bouts of writing. She was twelve when Sophie's Choice was published and that's only a brief memory. Alexandra leans heavily on William Styron: A Life by James L. W. III for most of her material. The rest that she can glean is from manuscripts from Duke University and what she can remember of their lives together.
You would think from the title that Alexandra read all of his books. Nah, that didn't happen. She really only read one much, much later.
William Styron was not much of a father. He spent most of his time closed up in a room writing feverishly and barely spent time with his family. The four siblings knew never to disturb him (he would fly off in a rage if the stupidest things happened) so they stayed away from him. His pleasures were to drink himself into a stupor and all of their parties consisted of an exorbitant amount of alcohol which lasted well into the early morning.
The biggest problem that I had with this book was that the author seemed to write mostly about herself and a small part about her father (of course, he was so miserable that the more you read about him and his behavior, the more disgusted you became). Also, there was an inordinate amount of name-dropping. When William became a celebrity, he hobnobbed with quite a few: Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellmann, George Plimpton, Leonard Bernstein, Art Buchwald, Arthur Miller, the list goes on forever.
I liked her style of writing, at first, but then it became a giant irritant. Too many flowery phrases with metaphors thrown in.
Unless you're a true William Styron fan, you might want to plow through this book. For the rest of us, skip it.
Not recommended.