William Styron has passed away. He was one of the first great contemporary Southern writers I read, and I spent a spring consuming Sophie’s Choice, A Tidewater Morning, and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Each of them saturated me, and I had to wait a day or two before picking up something new to read. (I was also reading the Border Trilogy that season — I must have been craving intensity — and he and Cormac McCarthy are somehow intertwined in my mind. Did they like each other in real life? I don't know. Their techniques are so different, yet both so vast.) Later, I read Darkness Visible and thought “Yes, that’s it exactly.” Nobody else has written about depression with the clarity and lyricism that Styron did. I doubt anyone will.

I really liked knowing he was around in the world.