Post #95 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
Reading My Father: A Memoir
REVIEWED BY: Lanie Tankard
Childhood events shape both a person and a writer. Alexandra Styron, author of the novel All the Finest Girls, explores her early years in a memoir titled Reading My Father, recently released in paperback. She mines that youthful period of her life in search of occasions that formed her, and the people who starred in those stories. In the title role is her father, the most formidable dynamic in her young existence.
His placement on the cover of her memoir takes on added meaning because her father is the distinguished writer William Styron, and all was not well in Alexandra Styron’s parent-child relationship.
She serves as a role model of triumph over powerful forces that might have destroyed someone less resilient. Alexandra Styron describes growing up amidst parental fighting, and being alternately ignored and verbally abused by her father as he juggled alcohol, adultery, and depression.
“My parents weren’t taking care of themselves,” she told an audience in Austin, Texas, on March 26, 2012, in a talk sponsored by the Texas Book Festival at Lamberts. I was fortunate to be in that audience that evening.
She writes her memoir in a cathartic yet amazingly warm and touching way. In ferreting out the reasons for her father’s behavior, she obtains healing through the process. By linking various periods of her father’s own life with the magnificent novels he was writing at those times, she also fleshes out an important writer in a way that offers greater depth to his works.
Her father’s papers are archived at Duke University, where Alexandra Styron did much of the research for her memoir.
“I went to Duke to see if I could find him,” she told the Austin audience. In this video, the author examines some of what she found there.
[NOTE: You can watch the video at the bottom of this blog.]
She also explained her writing process to the Texas listeners: “Get the kids to school. Go to an office I have somewhere that I go into for two to three hours a day.”
“I tried to describe from a child’s perspective,” she said of her memoir. “The actual act of writing isn’t glamorous to me. I became a writer because I wanted to explore the human heart and to tell stories.”
When she began to tell her own story, however, it was difficult.
“For me,” she noted, “the hardest part was talking about myself. I wanted to tell my father’s story. There is a line between remaining yourself for no purpose and turning your story into something larger for a greater purpose.”
She listed Nabokov, Flaubert, Wharton, and Fitzgerald in answer to a question about which novelists she admires.
“I don’t read much by experimental writers,” she said. “I’m a very traditional reader.”
One of her Austin listeners wondered if it had been emotionally draining to write her memoir.
“Yes,” she answered, “but it was also quite invigorating.”
When she finished the memoir, her three siblings were the first readers, along with her husband.
“My mother has become a great champion of the book,” she said, “which was shocking to her in many ways. She didn’t know some of the things. She’s an optimist and I popped a pin in her balloon. The essential truth from mother and daughter was the same at the end, but the process was not easy. I couldn’t write the truth as I know it by entertaining everyone else’s idea of the truth. My father was a truth teller.”
“There was a time when you couldn’t tell the truth,” she added, “in the Fifties.“
Alexandra Styron thinks her father would be proud of the book, but also mad about it.
William Styron is best known for a trio of incredibly powerful and lyrically gorgeous novels: Lie Down in Darkness
In her Austin talk, Alexandra affirmed, “My father was a novelist, and even though he wrote essays and nonfiction, not another novel ever emerged.” William Styron ultimately left unfinished the early drafts of several unpublished novels as he drifted into a deep depression. Imagine Alexandra Styron’s surprise when she discovered them in the archives at Duke while writing her memoir.
A fundamental quest driving her research was trying to figure out whether her father was unable to write and it drove him mad, or whether it was vice versa, for in heightening her awareness of him she was seeking deeper comprehension of herself. While he was alive, “my father was supportive [of my writing] until I went off to an MFA program. It was toxic that I was writing and he wasn’t, and it was hard for him to be supportive.
William Styron noted in a 1954 interview: “The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.” Decades later, he wrote an acclaimed account of his depression, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.
“Before Darkness Visible,” Alexandra Styron reminded her Austin listeners, “no one had articulated what it was like to be drowning in the despair of depression.”
Unlike his daughter, though, William Styron never wrote a memoir about his early life. Memoir and fiction are often so much more closely intertwined than the reader could possibly imagine, however, and he often placed a number of events, scenes, and characters from his Virginia childhood in the novels he wrote. He once observed about himself: “I sometimes feel that the characters I’ve created are not much more than sort of projected facets of myself, and I believe that a lot of fictional characters have been created that way.”
His daughter agreed.
“Good books will always borrow from your own life,” she remarked in her Austin talk.
She theorized that at the time her father was writing, “fiction was seen as more manly” compared to memoir. “Post WWll was the era of the Great American Male Novelist,” she said. “Novelists aren’t as revered today. Reality TV has taken the place of fiction.”
Alexandra Styron’s mission in her memoir is not unlike that of Lyman Ward, the narrator in Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose. She, too, deconstructs four generations: the previous two (her parents and her grandparents) for an understanding of the third (herself) to be able to explain them to the fourth (her own children). It was a challenging task.
“The boy in my father was an elusive animal,” she wrote in her memoir.
William Styron’s unexpressed grief over the slow decade-long death of his mother during his most vulnerable childhood years, followed by the insertion of an unsupportive stepmother into his teenage years, eventually combusts in unhealthy ways during his later adulthood — coming full circle to singe his own daughter’s vulnerable childhood years.
The story touches me deeply, as young William Styron resided in a Virginia house a half block away from the house where my late husband grew up sixteen years later, even sharing some of the same doctors. Styron was off to boarding school by then, leaving behind Hilton Village in Newport News, where Hampton Roads begins.
My husband used to take great joy in showing me all his childhood haunts, touchstones characterized in such perfect detail by William Styron in the title story of his novella, “A Tidewater Morning.” Both lads had skiffs they paddled along the James River.
When I stroll that old tree-shaded neighborhood today with my brother-in-law, I pause in front of 56 Hopkins Street, the Styron home. I can easily envision a happy little family of three living there — until Cancer came to visit and overstayed its welcome. That pain, too, William Styron described in “A Tidewater Morning,” as the fictional thirteen-year-old protagonist confronts the day his mother died. Over half a century later, the real teenage boy who met unbearable loss was finally able to write about it.
Where did the boy in the story take his sadness?
“The pier! My second summer home, my hangout, my club, my Riviera, my salvation.” Hilton Pier stretches out into the mighty James River, four-and-a-half miles wide at that point, behind the old brick Hilton Elementary School that both William Styron and my husband attended.
Since I, too, spent a large chunk of my formative years on a pier, although a different pier, I understand the significance of waves lapping softly against weathered wooden pilings adorned with barnacles, while green moss tendrils undulate around them. That kind of memory is one you pack in your suitcase as you depart your childhood haunts to become an adult. It begs to be let out at some point.
My husband once unfolded his in a memoir vignette about Hilton Pier: “This pier was a very significant place for me when I was growing up. A lot of the identity of the town where I lived, Hilton Village, was tied up in Hilton Pier. The pier started where the school playground stopped. It was a very clear line of demarcation. During the school day, no students were allowed on the pier. But as soon as the school day was officially over, students could go on the pier. Some days my friends and I would ride our bikes home, put our books down, get something to eat, and ride our bikes back to the pier.”
Later, when we visited his family with our three daughters, my husband loved to take us all down to the pier for an after-dinner walk.
“It’s a great place to watch a sunset,” Jim Tankard wrote in his memoir vignette.
I sit there today and I wonder: How many Tidewater sunsets did William Styron watch from that pier? And I am seized by a What If. Just suppose, for a minute, that Cancer had not knocked on the door of 56 Hopkins Street when it did — say, if Death had gone on strike that year, as in José Saramago’s novel Death With Interruptions — waiting perhaps several decades before arriving? William Styron would have grown up to be another person altogether, with altered memories. Would literature still be the recipient of his powerful contributions? Could he have imagined a grief-stricken thirteen-year-old boy lobbing newspapers off the end of Hilton Pier to assuage unspeakable agony in A Tidewater Morning? That window into the misery of depression — would it have remained tightly shut if William Styron had not had the frame of reference he did to fling it open in his celebrated memoir, Darkness Visible?
Alexandra Styron’s potent memoir would surely be a very different one. And yet the eloquent book she did write, full of the childhood memories she stuffed into her suitcase, rang as true as the pain her father inserted into his fictional characters. The father she read was the father she had.
“Irascible as he was,” she wrote in her memoir, “I didn’t know what, or who, I’d be without him.”
William Styron himself once noted: “…a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.”
His daughter put it this way: “Whether he meant to or not, Daddy taught us the lesson—a lesson which tested him hard at the end of his days—that life requires courage, and a sense of humor.”
I marvel at the way Alexandra Styron unpacked her valise in Reading My Father. It’s a great example of how to extract poetry rather than revenge from a difficult childhood.
[All photos by Lanie Tankard]
Lanie Tankard is a freelance writer and editor in Austin, Texas. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews, she has also been an editorial writer for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.
