Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Passion for Reading and Pat Conroy

I always say I’m first a reader since reading has saved my sanity at times and kept me enchanted with life at other times. Naturally, I’m delighted when I find my favorite authors sharing the same sentiment.

I just read Pat Conroy’s My Reading Life, a memoir on books and reading, and I can’t believe an author so ardent and brilliant with words while writing fiction can still use them as passionately with non-fiction. This, however, should not come new to me because I remember his semi-fictional book The Water is Wide about the year he taught school in Daufuskie Island, which he called Yamacraw Island.

I suspect all Conroy’s writing is semi-fictional following the footsteps of The Great Santini. Still, he is intent on story-telling and insists that story-telling is his priority. “The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’“ he writes.

Pat Conroy gives much more of himself to readers than most any author (IMHO), but it is not only the spilling guts part that delights me. It is his use of the language, his directness, and his clarity of expression, as when he says, “I grew up a word-haunted boy” or “I have built a city from the books I read.” Simple, profound, passionate. Who among us writers here in Writing.com is not “word-haunted”?

Then on page 316, on why he writes, he says: “A novel is my fingerprint, my identity card, and the writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.” Can any words dig deeper than that?

I’m totally and gratefully stunned.

Books by Pat Conroy:

My Reading Life
South of Broad
Beach Music
The Prince of Tides
The Lords of Discipline
The Great Santini
The Water is Wide
The Boo
My Losing Season
Pat Conroy Cookbook