My Hero, Pat Conroy

My Hero, Pat Conroy

Author Pat Conroy exposed his family’s wounds and those of his childhood for all the world to see. As hard as it is to read about abuse, his writing provides relief from the difficult passages by shining the light of well-chosen words and transcendent descriptions of landscapes and cities. Whether it’s on a shrimp boat on an inlet in South Carolina or sitting at a café in Rome having breakfast – it is sheer poetry. I can pick up any of his books from my collection and begin re-reading and get a chill that goes through my body. It touches a nerve. Now that’s great writing.

Rarely does a writer give of himself like Conroy did, holding nothing back regarding the pain of his life. Periodically, I have had to stop reading one of his intense books, like The Prince of Tides, and remind myself while I gasp for breath, “It’s just a book, it’s just a book!” 

I am one of the millions of adults who have gobbled up Pat Conroy’s books as if we were starving. And we were hungry, waiting for someone to tell our story. For those of us whose spirits were almost broken in childhood, Pat was and is our hero. (He died in 2016 of pancreatic cancer.) I have never had a case of hero worship before and yet here I am, with a heart full of gratitude for Pat Conroy, a Southern writer who spoke for legions by telling his/our story. His books remind me that we are brave and we survived. 

Pat Conroy wrote ten best-selling books and a teleplay. A few of his books were made into movies: Conrack, adapted from The Water is Wide, starring Jon Voight; The Prince of Tides, produced and starring Barbara Streisand; and The Great Santini with Robert Duvall, playing Pat’s father. Other books include The Boo, South of Broad, Beach Music, My Losing Season, The Death of Santini and The Lords of Discipline. 

Pat, from a military family, continued the tradition by going to the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. He married young, raised kids, taught school, ended up having two more marriages, lived in Italy, California and Beaufort, South Carolina, became a successful writer, made lots of money and  lived out his later years in his beautiful home on Fripp Island, South Carolina with his wife of 18 years, writer Cassandra King Conroy. He had plenty of ups and downs along the way with depression a constant companion. No matter what was happening, Pat just kept on writing. 

For me, no writer has chronicled abuse as eloquently and truthfully as Pat. His critics often disapproved of his writing as too wordy, too poetic or too descriptive with his incredibly long run-on sentences. That is their opinion and they may be right, but that was his style. Pat prepared himself for writing by reading poetry before he sat down with his notepads to write in longhand. Often, he was fighting depression, eating and drinking too much and yet he did what he had to do.  

By reading books about Pat, like Cassandra King Conroy’s Tell Me a Story and Katherine Clark’s My Exaggerated Life, written with Pat’s input before he died, you will learn even more about Pat and how he was beloved by the people who knew him.  Benny Shein (Pat’s best friend from teen years to Pat’s death), wrote Pat Conroy: A Lifelong Friendship. A group of his friends published their memories of Pat in Our Prince of Scribes, which contains endearing descriptions and wonderful reminiscences of their relationships with Pat. 

I visited the Pat Conroy Literary Center at 601 Bladen Street in Beaufort, South Carolina several times. It is located in a building a few blocks back from the main street of Beaufort. There is no entry fee and no tickets to buy. Just walk in and you will find a warm, replicated set-up of Pat’s office where he wrote from a huge desk, surrounded by shelves of his favorite books. There are displays of the original artwork used on the book covers and several glass cases containing personal items, letters and ephemera. 

You will be met by a volunteer host who may have known Pat. If you are lucky, like I was, this person may share many personal stories with you. The Pat Conroy Literary Center was established by Pat to support writers through workshops and retreats, and to provide mentoring, financial aid, book launches and events. (See patconroyliteraycenter.org for hours, directions and current events.) 

On one back wall of the center, there is a bulletin board covered with thank you notes and letters to Pat written by grateful readers and visitors. Reading these, you want to cry at such an outpouring of gratitude. They are tributes to a writer who, despite his own pain, post-traumatic stress and depression, just kept on writing. His followers love him as if he were their personal advocate and savior.  

I treasure my impressions of Pat from attending his annual talks for the Institute of Psychiatry in the small auditorium at MUSC. He would be introduced and would stride onto the stage to the speaker’s podium reminding me of the Saturday Night Live comedian, Chris Farley. Pat was a short, rotund man with a round pink face, twinkling blue eyes and a comb-over. But as soon as he started speaking, everyone would go into a trance, listening to his southern mellifluous voice.

There must be a word (probably in German) to describe the exquisite feelings I experienced each time I attended his talks - somewhere between laughing and crying, hilarity and relief. It felt like an emotional roller coaster listening to the horrible abuse he and his siblings suffered. I still don’t know how he made much of it so funny. (To get a flavor of this, you can hear an interview with Pat by Walter Edgar on the Walter Edgar’s Journal program from South Carolina Public radio.)

Listening to Pat and his siblings trade memories and the subsequent laughter reminded me so much of my mother and her two brothers talking about their childhood with a brutal alcoholic father. I remember after holiday dinners when Grandma and Grandpa left to go home, the three adult siblings remained at the table with the conversation always drifting to their childhood memories. As I was the only grandchild old enough to eat at the “grown-up” table, I continued to sit quietly - all ears - as one story after another brought on gales of laughter. I remember thinking, What’s so funny? It sounded pretty cruel to me. It took years until I understood it was catharsis.

“Do you remember when Dad took me with him to some out-of-the-way bar and left me there in the car all night?” Each story was met with laughter as one story topped the former. I’m aware now that this was therapy for them. They were witnesses for each other as were Pat’s siblings. My younger cousins were in the next room so the worst war stories of beatings with a belt, the back-hand strikes at the table, the cursing, and demeaning, embarrassing scenes were not discussed. 

Pat said, “One of the greatest gifts you can have as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.” He is right, it gives you a lot of material. But not every writer can put the words together to make the reader laugh and cry at the same time. Pat Conroy made poetry out of his life and he championed those who survived a childhood of pain. One of his last books was about his dad and it may be my favorite - The Death of Santini. This book took us all the way to the very end of a father-son relationship. He forgave and that is why Pat Conroy is my hero and “great love.”