Most of you will probably recognize Styron as the author of Sofie's Choice. I myself had not read Sofie's Choice, or any other book by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, so Darkness Visible was my first introduction to Styron. The book is an expansion on a lecture the author gave in 1989 at the John Hopkins University on affective disorders.

A memoir of madness, as the book is also called, follows Styron into the claw of depression and melancholia, near suicide and back to a normal life. The plunge was primarily triggered by his all-of-a-sudden inability to consume alcohol that had over the years become Styron's life long friend next to his wife. The first obvious signs started in the late spring of the mid-1980s when Styron's body all of a sudden said no to alcohol and made him an instant teetotaller. From there on his mood changed slowly for the worse, a change he at first attributed to his alcohol problem. But his mood became worse with time - not better as could be expected from withdrawal syndrome. We trace his steps from Paris, where the story begins at the moment he realized he really needed help and was not just in a bad mood, back to the USA and finally into a psychiatric clinic.

Styron's personal story is interwoven with the historical perception of melancholia throughout history and other tidbits about the illness. It is a very short book - I picked it up and noticed that the print was fairly large and the last page had a number in the mid 80-s. Even though I was watching TV in parallel with a lot of interruptions, I still managed to finish the book in the span of an evening. That much for the length of the book, but the length of the books does not say much about the book itself, just as the cover does not sat much about the quality of the text. To make any judgement, content is king.

Darkness Visible is a good book, but perhaps not the best book on depression available. Partly because it is fairly short and therefore somewhat shallow and not very detailed. But it does give the impression of being written for the reader that has already read a few books about the illness. And in that light, it is OK that not every little basic detail about depression is included. My impression is that Styron's purpose with the book was to describe what a sufferer actually feels. Why was he melancholy? Why was he unable to be social and talkative? Where did he find support? And in that he succeeds. I enjoyed it because it is personal and because Styron actually writes as someone who has actually pondered his illness fairly objectively (he did even read the DSM when he suspected he suffered from depression months before his deep plunge into the illness).