He admires his wile Rose for standing by him at his most obliterated, and we get a sense of uplift when his hospitalization and new drug begin to take hold. By then we are convinced that his illness is as he says, "so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression." Only various lines from Dante, he thinks, come near to showing his experience. It's best when dramatizing a deepening stage in the illness, and it comes to a high point when Styron decides to kill himself and throws his private diary into the garbage.
In general, the tour of the depression he renders is gripping, though simply as writing it could have done with more intense immediacy and searing detail. The depths of his depression carried him far beyond alcohol withdrawal and pill poisoning, Styron says. His depression would sweep over him late in the day, just at the time of the afternoon nap he could no longer achieve and apparently just before the hour of the first drink that he could no longer have. He puts forth various genetic hints (his father had "battled the gorgon for much of his lifetime") and suggests buried childhood events to explain the origins of his illness. Shortly thereafter, he went into depression, which he thinks may or may not have been tied in with going cold turkey off booze. In 1984, Styron's 30 years of alcohol and more recent excessive tranquilizer intake (Halcion) combined to make alcohol poisonous to his system and deprived him totally of his friendly balm, the alcohol that he says allowed him to open up his works as a clear mind never could (he adds that he never wrote while drinking). Much of this slim (96-page) work appeared last year in Vanity Fair magazine. Styron tells of his descent into clinical depression, later hospitalization, and recovery.
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