Darkness Visible

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"Mr. Styron's description of his climactic night of 'despair beyond despair' moved me (a healthy, nondepressive personality) to the point that I felt I was facing my own death. Here is an example of art refined in the fire of experience: the writing is so pure one is hardly aware of the ink on the page." —Edmund Morris In the summer of 1985, William Styron was overtaken by persistent insomnia and a troubling sense of malaise—the first signs of a deep depression that would engulf his life and leave him on the brink of suicide. In <i>Darkness Visible</i> a great novelist describes his devastating descent into depression, taking us on an unprecedented journey into the realm of madness. Expanded from his celebrated <i>Vanity Fair</i> piece, this moving memoir is an intimate portrait of the agony of Styron's ordeal, as well as a probing look at an illness that affects millions but is still widely misunderstood. "To most of those who have experienced it," Styron writes, "the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression." Through Styron's remarkable candor and powers of description, we come truly to understand the anguish of a mind desperate unto death. We are moved yet not depressed by his account: with him, we feel uplifted by a sense of catharsis and can at last begin to fathom depression's dark reality.