READING MY FATHER : A Memoir. By Alexandra Styron. Scribner, New York, N.Y. April 2011. 285 pages, photographs. $25 hardcover.

Could Tolstoy have been wrong? Not about all unhappy families being unhappy in different ways — we’re basically in agreement about that — but where are the happy families to which he alluded? Did he know any? Do we? Families without financial woes? No hurt feelings, no sensitivities clashing with another’s neuroses, no addictions, no dysfunctions of any kind?

So positing that all families are at least occasionally unhappy, and that unhappy families are indeed unhappy with their own branded traits, which ones make for a story worth putting down on paper?

What’s required is a memoirist with an eye for exquisite nuance. She must have an honesty that pinpoints all the disturbances in the field, as well as the delights, the mysteries, the horror. Finally what’s required is a precision with words like the best portrait painter. It is then that you have a saga of a uniquely unhappy family that elicits compulsive page-turning, and of which Tolstoy himself would have approved.

Alexandra Styron is that memoirist in her new book, Reading My Father, about, of course, the Vineyard’s late and most illustrious writer, William Styron, Bill to the multitudes of Islanders who knew him personally.

William Styron was born on June 11, 1925 in Newport News, Virginia. His father, William Sr., was 37, his mother, Pauline, 35: what obstetricians write on their charts, “elderly prima para.” They moved to a house in the first federal housing project of its kind, designed for a shipbuilding company during World War I.

As a marine engineer, William Sr. missed out on affiliating with the higher caste of senior executives who lived in fancy houses in another part of town. But neither did the erudite and socially shy man mix well with the thousands of rowdy shipbuilders who lived and worked all around him. Pauline was a singer-manqué who’d toured Europe and studied with a maestro in Vienna. Later she was certified at the University of Pennsylvania to teach music herself. Clearly the Styrons’ neighborhood was an awkward fit for both of them. It was challenging too, for their precocious only child, William Jr., surrounded as he was by families with rampant numbers of siblings.

When William was three, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and was treated with a double mastectomy. Later the cancer metastasized into her bones. In her final years, she was crippled and wracked with pain. She died when William Jr. was 13. He lost his father as well to an interminable period of grief.

What came more easily to young William was his writing career. Although his path was not devoid of setbacks, mostly his own insecurities leading to endless rewrites of draft after draft, all the breaks fell his way. At Duke University in the early 40s, his talent was cultivated by a brilliant teacher, Dr. William Blackburn, who in time introduced his star pupil to connections in the New York publishing world. Hiram Haydn at Crown offered the young prodigy a book contract for what was to become Lie Down in Darkness. The novel revolved around a young Southern girl, dead by suicide at the story’s outset, her remains rattling in a coffin on a train bound for Tidewater country.

It took three-and-a-half years for Styron to hand in his manuscript. “I ain’t no speedball,” he admitted to a literary agent, Elizabeth McKee. But the book, published in 1951 when the author was 26, received wild acclaim. Much like F. Scott Fitzgerald in an earlier generation of writers, Styron found himself a distinguished man-of-letters overnight, and at an uncommonly youthful age.

His subsequent, long-awaited book, published in 1960, Set This House on Fire, suffered the second-novel jinx; compared to the first masterpiece, it was judged a stinker. Ms. Styron describes the story about American ex-pats on the Riviera as, “a sprawling meditation on the nature of evil — rape, murder and suicide all figure in the plot — centered on three characters and multiple, shifting points of view.”

Styron triumphed with his third novel inspired by a real-life slave rebellion. Confessions of Nat Turner, published in 1967, garnered its author the Pulitzer Prize, although growing militancy in the civil rights movement drew controversy from a number of black writers and activists.

Then came Sophie’s Choice in 1979, a tremendous best-seller followed by a movie starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Styron’s essays, collections of letters and anthologies of short stories poured from his pen — literally; he never learned to use a typewriter. His fourth and last important work was Darkness Visible, released in 1990, recording the profound depression, the “despair beyond despair” as he called it, that descended upon him at the age of 60.

Within the agony and the ecstasy of professional life and decades of alcoholism, there was the pure fairytale of the world into which William Styron’s success plunged him. He received the Prix de Rome for Lie Down in Darkness, which brought him to the American Academy in Rome and his whirlwind courtship of Baltimore poet Rose Burgunder. They married on the Campidoglio in May of 1953. The bride’s wealthy mother had originally repudiated the scruffy writer, and even had him investigated by private detectives. By the time of the wedding, the Baltimore doyenne had learned to be charmed by her new son in law.

Alexandra, the baby in the family of six, grew up in a world where George Plimpton, Irwin Shaw, James Baldwin, the Kennedys, in particular her mother’s good friend, Jacqueline Kennedy, among many other writers, artists and luminaries, were regular guests at their homes in Roxbury, Conn., and on West Chop on Martha’s Vineyard. And yet, for all the glamour, comfort and Leonard Bernstein thumping out Christmas carols on the Styron’s grand piano, Alexandra — called Al and Albert by her dad — barely knew her father:

“As a girl, I often found myself home alone with him. My sisters and brothers were all gone by the time I was in fourth grade; my mother, escaping the tinderbox her marriage had become, had begun traveling constantly by the time I was five. The house where we spent most of the year, a creaky old Connecticut farmhouse, bound by woods, was scary. My father was scarier. I survived by employing a child’s best instinct for getting what she needs. I didn’t whine, I didn’t demand, and I hid my multiple failings and fears behind a smooth and carefully cultivated mask of self-sufficiency. But, above all, I soothed my father’s savage breast by making him laugh — and standing up to even the most extreme of his humor in kind.”

There is no way a single review can even hint at all the layers of complexity and richness that Ms. Styron brings to her memoir of this profoundly complex and richness-laden family. She zigs and zags back and forth in time so seamlessly that even this easily-muddled reporter was able to keep up. The account of William Styron’s last horrendous years, in and out of the Yale Psychiatric Institute and various hospitals, including our own, are shocking to read. And yet the phoenix rising from Bill’s ashes is Al herself, the heir to his writing talent, contentedly married with two great kids . . . hey! A happy family! Apologies to Tolstoy.