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Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness Kindle Edition
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The New York Times–bestselling memoir of crippling depression and the struggle for recovery by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice.
In the summer of 1985, William Styron became numbed by disaffection, apathy, and despair, unable to speak or walk while caught in the grip of advanced depression. His struggle with the disease culminated in a wave of obsession that nearly drove him to suicide, leading him to seek hospitalization before the dark tide engulfed him. Darkness Visible tells the story of Styron’s recovery, laying bare the harrowing realities of clinical depression and chronicling his triumph over the disease that had claimed so many great writers before him. His final words are a call for hope to all who suffer from mental illness that it is possible to emerge from even the deepest abyss of despair and “once again behold the stars.” This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media
- Publication dateMay 4, 2010
- File size4078 KB
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From Library Journal
- Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Compelling . . . a vivid portrait of a debilitating disorder. . . . It offers the solace of shared experience.” —The New York Times“Shocks us back to reality. . . . A moving and authoritative account.” —Entertainment Weekly
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About the Author
William Styron (1925–2006), born in Newport News, Virginia, was one of the greatest American writers of his generation. Styron published his first book, Lie Down in Darkness, at age twenty-six and went on to write such influential works as the controversial and Pulitzer Prize–winning The Confessions of Nat Turner and the international bestseller Sophie’s Choice.
Product details
- ASIN : B00BBPVYUS
- Publisher : Open Road Media (May 4, 2010)
- Publication date : May 4, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 4078 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 98 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #97,978 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #11 in Depression (Kindle Store)
- #18 in Two-Hour Biography & Memoir Short Reads
- #101 in Depression (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
William Styron (1925-2006) , a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Legion d'Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.
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I write to you today knowing that you died in the Autumn of 2006. Hopefully you will not resent my intrusion into your long and much deserved rest.
After talking for many years about the shortest book of your extinguished writing career, you should be pleased to know I have just finished reading "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness" and it is clear to me, perhaps much to your undeserved distress, that we have been brothers in the arms of the Devil named depression.
Being somewhat younger now than you were when you passed on, I came to know you in likely the least admirable way from your perspective, by the motion picture "Sophie's Choice" via Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, followed by reading the book, and then your other books "The Confessions of Matt Turner" and "The Long March.
I see by your admission in Darkness Visible that you might believe that depression was in your soul from childhood. This I do not dispute but we do not share similar backgrounds.
The monster that I have come to call "the hole" came to me in 2003 and eventually swallowed me up by July. As I look back, as you did in your book, what was besetting me day by day for 6 or 7 months was a mystery to me, a surprise over time from an unexpected and most unwelcome visitor. I really did not understand what was happening or where I was headed.
Like you, I eventually came as most depression sufferers do to the wall of death aka suicide, and like you, but for apparently different reasons, I was able by the grace of God, or luck, or total accident to retreat and save myself.
Round two came several years later. Previously hardened by wrestling with this monster, even though the ideation of doing myself in was a daily companion, I made an oath to my soul and to those who love me even at my worst that suicide was a bad joke I would laugh at for the rest of my days. Feel like dying? Oh yes. Suicide? Not on my to do list.
Lucky me, I have climbed out of the hole again and life is better and richer and more creative and more interesting today than it has ever been. I am confirmation of your postulation that there can be a "shining world" upon recovery.
I lost my great friend and brother I never had, James Travis Cackler, to depression induced suicide in April of the year of your death. I was the eulogizer at his funeral, the hardest job I have ever had to do. I loved this man so much.
To you Sir William, I say thank you for exposing the bare and tender underbelly of your soul, your dreadful fall and triumphant rise from the suicidal grips of this insidious disease.
And to those of you who are in this dreadful state of mind and body, and to those of you who are falling but do not yet know to what depth you will descend, I can tell you that depression is Hell. But, you can and most likely will escape and recover. But, if you choose to kill yourself - and it IS a choice - all hope is lost.
We who have been to the far side of Hell and back, and in many cases more than once, can tell you better than anyone why suicide is a very bad idea. Because we have suffered as you are suffering and returned and did not do ourselves in, we are proof of something that is hard to imagine, especially the first time you are in the hole.
The old theme song from the TV series "MASH" says that suicide is painless? Perhaps you can turn your lights off permanently without too much suffering, but you will NEVER in Heaven or Hell be able to undo the pain you cause to those who love you and fellow sufferers of depression who love you even though they have never met you.
By hook or by crook or by luck or by miracle of miracles, find yourself a brother or sister who has been in the same hole you are in and has survived. William and I are both able to tell you that there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is not an oncoming train.
Hope is your reward earned by enduring unimaginable pain. You can be whole again and you can honor your good fortune by helping others survive and prosper, as our colleague in suffering William Styron has done in his most eloquent and excruciating book. Read, live and prosper. After all you have been through, you more than anyone deserve this.
Thank you so much, William, for helping us help ourselves. I love and salute you. And to my fellow compatriots, 5000 IU of a good quality vitamin D-3 per day is what works for me. I have never taken pharmaceuticals for depression, and I never will.
If you are a fellow sufferer, or if you know someone who is, read Darkness Visible, save a life.
While the book is interesting and it does contain some insight, it just feels like a shame that Styron's mannered style got the best of him in what should have been a simple and earnest account of his battle with depression.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Mexico on September 10, 2019
Reading this book sparks interest in the work of some French crackerjacks. For example, Styron talked about Camus’ The Stranger, Baudelaire’s intimate journals, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – all sharing a common theme of death, depression, darkness. I bet those who have read these would be able to appreciate this memoir better. I certainly was.
“If our lives had no other configuration but this, we should want, and perhaps deserve, to perish; if depression had no termination, then suicide would, indeed, be the only remedy. But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered from the disease--and they are countless--bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable.”
That clinical depression is idiopathic and likely to be different in each of its victim, is sufficient reason to rebut the notion that it’s always conquerable, of course at the risk of sounding pessimistic. I applaud the late William Styron’s layman grasp of America’s neuropsychiatry especially in the 90s, and his insistence that hospitalization should never fall into the abyss of societal stigma.
A short and sweet memoir that people who don’t understand depression can benefit from reading. The prose is reminiscent of Ocean Vuong when he speaks.