What's it like to find your way as the youngest child of a famous (and famously difficult) father? Alexandra Styron offers an absorbing account

While we're more or less on the subject of this week's New Yorker--the Dec. 10 issue, that is, the one with Hendrik Hertzberg's "Comment" on Bush the Regime-Changer--there's a piece in it for which I'm afraid you're going to have to beg, borrow, or buy the issue itself. Maybe I'm going soft, but I was powerfully moved in all sorts of ways by a compact memoir called "Reading My Father" by Alexandra Styron, at 41 the youngest of the four children of the celebrated writer William Styron (1925-2006).

I don't think I was entirely fooled, though, and I find some encouraging confirmation that the lady can write in the form of a mammoth "abstract" of her piece which the New Yorker website has posted instead of the actual text--the "abstract" is so extensive that you wonder why they didn't just go ahead and post the whole thing. The abstract gives us what seem like all of the facts of the case, yet gives us almost none of the impact they have in Ms. Styron's own presentation.

In this one modest-size piece she gives us some sense of inside understanding of and feeling for:

* her parents' backgrounds and precariously balanced relationship, centering around her father's identity as not just a successful writer but a personality of a specific type: "Famous by his mid-twenties, he helped create the cliche of the gifted, hard-drinking, bellicose writer which gave so much of 20th-century literature a muscular, glamorous aura." (There's a fabulous Jill Krementz photograph of Bill and Rose Styron cutting up at home in 1972--no, not this photo, which is much later. In the 1972 photo we can see an amazing amount of their personalities as the author has presented them to us.)

* her own quite specific relationship with her father, not really closer than that of her older siblings (she makes it clear that he wasn't any kind of doting papa), but "a singular bond" resulting from the circumstance that she is seven years younger than her next-youngest sibling, meaning that the others were largely out of the house by the time she was growing up, leaving her to deal with this massively complex personality--to the extent that he dealt with any of his children--on her own, through good times and bad.

* her relationship with her father's writing, which is also fascinatingly complex, given how much of it had been done before she came along or was old enough to have any mechanism for dealing with it, only to find in it--in particular in Sophie's Choice, when she was finally able to read it all the way through--thematic and emotional resonances startlingly similar to what she was going through in her emergence to adulthood.

* an insider's account of what is probably now the best-known chapter in her father's life, the crippling depression that nearly destroyed him in 1985, from which he recovered enough to have another 15 years of compromised but reasonably satisfactory existence, and of course to produce his own account of this crisis, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, probably the most gripping piece of writing on depression we've been given.

* and, finally, an account of his much less known second siege of depression, from which he did not recover, descending instead into a final six-year "ongoing disaster" of medical wasting away.

I don't know that I've done any better than the official "abstract" at getting you to glimpse what it feels like to be inside this range of life experiences. The best I can do is give you some sense why you'll want to take this intriguing literary trip yourself.