The whole thing (it’s short, about 75 pages) reads like a man who is still depressed. It’s incredibly self-absorbed, a chronicle of Styron’s exclusive misery and not a single mention of what his depression did to his family, particulary his wife, Rose. She gets, I believe, two mentions in the book and neither of them illuminates how she dealt with watching her husband shrivel away. It’s disappointing that Stryon didn’t seem to think it important to go beyond descriptions of his own despair. It would have been incredibly enlightening to have some idea of the conversations he had with his wife during this time and to at least give us some sense of what she did to cope.

Finally, after months of suicidal thoughts and continuing physical decline, Styron checks himself into a hospital which, after seven weeks, he leaves, cured. But he never tells us HOW he was cured. He alludes to the idea of “giving over” to the illness and how that relieved him of the pressure of his depression. But was giving over the cure? He mocks the therapy he received in the hospital (group and art) as infantile and he doesn’t even mention if he was given drugs, although he talks a lot about the drugs he took before he went to the hospital and how ineffective they were. Styron makes it sounds as though his darkest days–days he wanted to kill himself in violent and painful ways–were fixed by a few weeks rest. I know there is more to it than that, and I have great respect for Stryon’s struggle, but he gives no insight into how he beat back his demons.

“Darkness Visible” is considered a classic chronicle of depression but I felt shut out by Stryon as his story verged on–I’m going to say it–whiny and, at the same time, clinical. And at the end, I think I did come to understand how his wife and family felt during Styron’s worst days.