Why I Love Pat Conroy

I first read Pat Conroy’s book My Losing Season, on Joe’s recommendation. He bought the last signed copy at the Southern Kentucky Book Fair one year, and he loved it. I remember being taken aback by the violence of Conroy’s father in the memoir, and while I found the story easy to follow and fairly interesting, I was not a big fan of sports stories at the time, and it wasn’t my favorite. I forgot about it almost as soon as I finished it.

I should really read that one again.

A couple  years later, I was a sponsor for my school at Beta Convention in Louisville. These were the years when bookstores were common, and Louisville actually had a huge Borders at the edge of Fourth Street Live. (I have no idea whose idea it was to include a bookstore as a part of this entertainment venue, but I bless their souls, and I still cry inside a little when I remember it is gone.) One of the things I liked to do at Beta Convention was buy a book to read in the hall when I had to sit up all night, ensuring my students remained both safe and in their rooms. I browsed rows of paperbacks and tables artfully spaced down the middle of the wide aisles. My husband Joe picked up Beach Music and handed it to me. “This author is good,” he said.

I was mostly intrigued that there was an author he loved that I didn’t recognize; we were at the point in our marriage when I was offended if there were things about him that I still didn’t know. He reminded me of My Losing Season, which I vaguely remembered. The premise on the back of the book sounded good, and I loved the title. The book was deliciously thick and also affordable. I bought it.

Beach Music became the first Pat Conroy book I fell in love with. I loved the main character, whom I gradually came to realize in all of Conroy’s books was always some form of Conroy himself, and I loved his deceitful and wicked mother, his daughter, and his hilarious brothers. Was it overwritten and hyperbolic, which are criticisms usually leveled at Conroy? Yes, of course, but that was part of the charm.

Conroy’s fiction is always autobiographical. He used his books to work through the psychological issues of his life, and in doing so, created harrowing and terrifying, but ultimately uplifting and honest looks into the human spirit and the resiliency of mankind. Conroy’s writing is full of humor and hope and reality, as all of my favorite books seem to be. He does not shy away from the gritty and heartbreaking things in that reality, but he balances it, as real life does, with humor, and eloquently demonstrates the ability of the heart to heal, to survive, to reach out and love again. Conroy got back up every time he was kicked down, and in reading his books, his audience begins to believe that they can too.

Conroy’s life was intense and sad. Abused physically by his father and raised by a mother who had a tenuous grasp on truth and no shortage of pretense and fakery, he lived in a military family who moved constantly. Stability was not something that came naturally or easily to him. He struggled with psychological issues for his entire life, and survived two suicide attempts. He lost a brother to suicide, and was estranged from one sister. He lost his beloved mother to cancer, reconciled his relationship to his father, then lost his father as well. And through it all, he continued to write incredibly beautiful stories, full of love for family, for friendship, for books and writing, for life.

Joe’s favorite of Conroy’s novels is The Prince of Tides, for its last amazing lines. I love his essay collection My Reading Life and his fabulous final book, The Death of Santini. Conroy never met a sentence he couldn’t fill with overstatement and metaphor, but his unusual, epic writing style brought out hidden beauty in life and stretched to welcome in the whole world. His books take the reader to dark places not only in Conroy’s own life, but also in the reader’s, as his words hold up a mirror reminding us of our weaknesses, our desires, and our power to overcome.

Sometimes I think back to that afternoon in the Louisville Borders, holding the hefty book in my hand. If I’d understood the emotional journeys I was about to make with this author, I might have put it back down. I know I was looking for something light and fun, and Conroy’s books cannot be accused of either, although he’s one of the most hilarious authors I’ve ever read. I’m so grateful that I did not walk away, as that book opened the door to one of the best literary adventures of my life. As one of his earliest titles attests, the water is wide, and Conroy is one of the authors whose words are still guiding me across those seas.