OT: RIP Pat Conroy

[Zorro]

Author of "My Losing Season", one of my favorite sports-themed books of all time, as well as "The Water is Wide" ("Conrack") "The Lords of Discipline" and a numer of other first rate books. If you haven't read My Losing Season, I recommend it to you highly.

 

[Zorro]

I don' t usually reply to my own posts, but I remembered this quote too late to edit;
"I was born to be a point guard, just not a very good one".

 

[bags27]

An outstanding writer--the South has produced so many. It must derive partly from ts conflicted Christian/Stoic tradition, its sense of duty and honor and yet guilt (for slavery) that led so many writers to be so thoughtful, so ironic, so able to handle ambiguity.

 

[rugbymate]

Beach Music....some books can just get to your core. He made an impact on how I thought about a number of issues. Thanks for the post.

 

[DGHuskyFan]

Great writer. I recently read his autobiography. Shedding light on his family upbringing and bouts of depression, mental illness, etc. Definitely gives you insight into the themes and characters from his novels. Especially "The Great Santini", which vaulted him to the national spotlight.

 

[Bonpland]

Author of "My Losing Season", one of my favorite sports-themed books of all time, as well as "The Water is Wide" ("Conrack") "The Lords of Discipline" and a numer of other first rate books. If you haven't read My Losing Season, I recommend it to you highly.

Z, I have to agree about My Losing Season. I put it alongside Feinsteins's The Last Amateurs as books that fans like us should read.

I was hesitant at first to read it because I expected it to be a re-hash of the experiences he had suffered through battling with his father (The Great Santini) about how to play the game, but instead it wound up highlighting what it is, and for many of us what it has been, to be a part of a team struggling to be better than they really are.

The losing part is not really what his story is about. Learning to play with and then rely on your teammates in trying circumstances informed the rest of his life and I've got to say that when I read it I was forced to remember how the one losing season my team suffered in college taught me more about perserverance and courage than had the victories of the other three seasons combined.

Conroy was resilient (he survived the childhood beatings and humiliations), courageous(he stood up for Civil Rights during the movement's most difficult period in his native South Carolina), and very particularly a Southern intellectual (read his My Reading Life) and for me he was a man of my own generation who witnessed the same events I did at a similar age.

Steven King is only one year his junior and juxtaposing King's autobiographical work (The Body, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing) with Conroy's remembrances paints a parallel but very different picture of their childhoods spent in the fifties and of their coming of age in the sixties.

Growing up and being educated in the Northeast I found myself drawn to identifying with King's experiences in rural Maine as a child of the working class, but it was Conroy's take on those years that offered me a perspective that I would not have found on my own.

Good writer, interesting man, and a voice that will be missed.

 

[Zorro]

Another great autobiography of the period, or a little later, is Mary Karr's trilogy, "The Liar's Club", "Cherry" and "Lit". Another really great writer and relentless and objective self-examiner.

 

[divots]

All-time favorite author who fully understood the beauty in language....I remember well these words from The Prince of Tides; "College was to teach me that I was one of life's journeymen, eager to excel but lacking the requisite gifts." Rest gently, Mr. Conroy knowing that your words will live forever.....

 

[tomcat]

I really enjoyed everything that Conroy wrote, especially Beach Music. I can remember reading it and being amazed. While some thought Conroy's style was overwrought, I thought he did a good job evoking emotion from really true family situations. I will go back and read that one again soon.

 

[Gabbyfan]

I always kept looking in bookstores for the next Pat Conroy novel, but sadly it never came....he was not like King who could keep writing and writing. I suspect quality writing such as Conroy's was a bit more difficult to craft and perhaps more painful. Nonetheless, I hope he found great satisfaction in what he did produce because the rest of us are better off for it.