Blog #95; On Meeting William Styron, Author of Sophie’s Choice, and reading his Widow Rose Styron’s memoir, Beyond This Harbor
I had the good fortune to get in contact with Mr. Styron right after he had written Darkness Visible, which had had both a soothing and an earth-shattering effect on me. If an excellent writer such as Styron had survived mental illness, and written so lucidly and candidly about it afterwards, couldn’t it be possible for me to recover and give voice to my experiences? I wrote him with praise which I had hoped was understood as sincere, and I especially thanked him for pointing me in the direction of Mozart’s Simphonia Concertante in C major. He agreed that it was a wonderful piece of music in his return postcard, which came a couple of weeks later. He said he would be happy to talk about Mozart and many other things when he visited Orlando to speak at my Alma Mater, UCF, courtesy of Don Stap, a respected poet in the English department. I told him when I met him on that Orlando stage that I felt a real kinship with Stingo, and he replied he did too. We laughed about that. The next day he
