What: Lowcountry stories come to life with personal insights and anecdotes from Southern authors Pat Conroy and John Warley at this Piccolo Spoleto event.
Looking forward as they both found love late in their families Pat Conroy writes about how his "mean Father" can come to Love in his book THE DEATH OF THE GREAT SANTINI. John writes about his adopted Korean Daughter with initial resistance from him and his family, however his wife wanted a daughter so badly that she won over and how acceptance with deep love forming over the years.
When: 6:30 p.m.
Where: The John Monroe J. Holliday Alumni Center, The Citadel, 69 Hagood Ave., downtown
Charleston
Ron Alexander thanks Bunni Vaughan Healy, Pat and I have had a long association. I was nearby in 1966/67 his last year at the Citadel, as I was at the Medical College. I dated THE BOO's (his first book) daughter. I was with him at the premier showing of Prince of Tides in San Francisco. He moved there with his Jewish Psychotherapist wife(he married the one from Prince of Tides unlike the book version where he goes back to his Southern wife). I was also with him at Marin Jewish Community Center in California also where he read from BEACH HOUSE to an overflowing crowd of 900 people. The Jewish people love him for his writing about the Southern Jewish Experience. We had a Beach Music band there. Tonight, I got him to sign his new book as the only person at the Prince of Tides premier wearing foul weather gear. It was supposed to be a costume party for the characters from Prince of Tides. He is going to be an editor at large for my new book about my tragic family. I told him that tonight, and he thought it was a good idea!
When I was thirty years old, my novel The Great Santini was published, and there were many things in that book I was afraid to write or feared that no one would believe. But this year I turned sixty-five, the official starting date of old age and the beginning count down to my inevitable death. I've come to realize that I still carry the bruised freight of that childhood every day. I can't run away, hide, or pretend it never happened. I wear it on my back like the carapace of a tortoise, except my shell burdens and does not protect. It weighs me down and fills me with dread.
The Conroy children were all casualties of war, conscripts in a battle we didn't sign up for on the bloodied envelope of our birth certificates. I grew up to become the family evangelist; Michael, the vessel of anxiety; Kathy, who missed her childhood by going to sleep at six every night; Jim, who is called the dark one; Tim, the sweetest one – and can barely stand to be around any of us; and Tom, our lost and never-to-be found brother. My personal tragedy lies with my sister, Carol Ann, the poet I grew up with and adored...
I've got to try and make sense of it one last time, a final circling of the block, a reckoning, another dive into the caves of the coral reef where the morays wait in ambush, one more night flight into the immortal darkness to study that house of pain one final time. Then I'll be finished with you, Mom and Dad. I'll leave you in peace and not bother you again. And I'll pray that your stormy spirits find peace in the house of the Lord. But I must examine the wreckage one last time.
Description
In this powerful and intimate memoir, the beloved bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and his father, the inspiration for The Great Santini, find some common ground at long last.Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for hate." As the oldest of seven children dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was his lifeline to a better world, the world of books and culture, and despite the serial confrontations with his father Pat managed to claw his way towards a life he hardly could have imagined as a child.
Pat's great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with his family life. While the publication of The Great Santini brought Pat much attention, the public rift it caused with his father generated more attention still. Their long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an already battered family even further. But as Pat tenderly chronicles here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years of his life, Don Conroy and his son reached a rapprochement of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely doled out backhanded slaps targeted his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He defended his son's honor.
THE DEATH OF SANTINI is a heart-wrenching account of personal and family struggle, and a poignant lesson in how ties of blood can both strangle and offer succor. It is an act of reckoning, an exorcism of demons, but one whose ultimate conclusion is that love can soften even the meanest of men, giving meaning to one of the most often quoted lines from his bestselling novel. The Prince of Tides: "In families there are no crimes that cannot be forgiven."
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