My first exposure to this great author was a movie . . . his book (though I didn't know it was based on a book about Conroy's childhood at the time) The Great Santini . . . memories of his childhood splashed in living color across movie screens everywhere. It was a hard movie to watch. The father in the story . . . a Marine . . . was an abusive man who terrorized his family . . . ruled his household with an iron fist. The boy in the movie suffering the same hands as Conroy himself. I was 16 . . . worldly in some ways . . . naive in others.
I wouldn't really know the story in full . . . the history of that father/son relationship until I read one of his last books, The Death of Santini, a non-fiction, autobiographical memoir.
Before his second movie, The Prince of Tides, came out, I discovered his book by the same name . . . read it in 2 days . . . fell in love with reading because of that story. Conroy had such a way with words . . . I could smell the South Carolina marshes . . . feel the oppressive heat of the lowcountry humidity . . . taste the salt in the air . . .
And then the movie . . . released 5 years after the book. It starred Nick Nolte . . . was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It filled in spaces that my imagination had not gone while reading the book . . . a truly raw story about a very, very dysfunctional family . . .
In '88 Jimmy Buffett wrote a song called "The Prince of Tides" . . . retelling the story in the book. He read passages from the book before and after the song.
Pat Conroy didn't write very many books . . . mostly because he was an unconventional writer . . . he didn't use a typewriter . . . or a computer . . .
Here's a list of all of them if you ever decide you want to read them:
- 1970: The Boo
- 1972: The Water Is Wide
- 1976: The Great Santini
- 1980: The Lords of Discipline
- 1986: The Prince of Tides
- 1992: Essay on the Hidden Subculture of Military Brats at the Wayback Machine (archived December 30, 2006) (Introduction to book, "Military Brats: Legacies of Growing Up Inside the Fortress")
- 1995: Beach Music
- 1999: The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life
- 2002: My Losing Season
- 2003: Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing up Global (contributing author)
- 2009: South of Broad
- 2010: My Reading Life
- 2013: The Death of Santini
- 2016: A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
His subjects aren't easy to read . . . but his character development is second to none. If you read only one of his books, make it The Lords of Discipline . . . the story of his years at The Citadel (the military college in South Carolina)
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