Author of the week: Pat Conroy

last updated 8 January 2015

Pat Conroy probably should be forgiven if he wasn’t the most faithful son, said Tony Gonzalez in the Nashville Tennessean. Like Bull Meecham, the central figure in Conroy’s 1976 novel The Great Santini, the author’s own father was a decorated Marine fighter pilot who won wide admiration in his public life even as he abused his wife and seven children behind closed doors. In fact, as Conroy sees it, his father did more harm to the Conroy family than Meecham did to his. “Some of my brothers or sisters don’t remember anything I describe,” says the author, now 68. “I remember everything.” Conroy remembers being regularly beaten and often watching his mother get knocked to the floor. “When somebody tells me they’re a really happy family,” he says, “what I hear is denial.”

That doesn’t mean Conroy harbors only hatred for his father, said Laurie Hertzel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. As the author recalls in his new memoir, The Death of Santini, that first novel changed everything. Conroy’s mother said he’d stabbed the family “right through the heart.” But his father, though furious at first, eventually took heed of the story, as the new tale shows. “I think he’s the first person I’ve ever heard of who changed his entire life based on his son’s novel,” Conroy says. “The book gave Dad a road map to not be like he was when we were growing up.” Conroy hasn’t forgiven the violence, even 15 years after his father’s death. But he accepts that the man had a better side. Human nature, he says, is “incredibly strange.”