Gone with the Wind has outlived a legion of critics … The novel works because it possesses the inexpressible magic where the art of pure storytelling rises above its ancient use and succeeds in explaining to a whole nation how it came to be this way. I tremble with gratitude as I honor her name. She lit signal fires for her son to feel and follow. My mother hungered for art, for illumination, for some path to lead her to a shining way to call her own. I take it as an article of faith that the novels I’ve loved will live inside me forever. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to teach me how to die. Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers … I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. Only after her death did I realize that my mother entered The Citadel the same day I did. I would bring notebooks home from The Citadel, and Mom would devour those of each literature course I took. 3-6ĭuring my high school and college career, she read every short story, poem, play and novel that I read. Quotations compiled from My Reading Life:Īn intellectual life often forms in the strangest, most infertile of conditions … (Whatever I was interested in, my mother answered me with trips to the library … There was nothing my mother could not bring me from a library … She read so many books that she was famous among the librarians in every town she entered … Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human … Peg Conroy used reading as a text of liberation, a way out of the sourceless labyrinth that devoured poor Southern girls like herself. In this book, he gets to tell that story. Reading – and the parents, teachers, mentors, librarians, book-sellers and colleagues who guided that reading – those who tossed books at him or tossed him to the books, built his backbone and his skeleton bone by bone, word by word. He kept lists of words and dragged out those lists desperately when he was stuck in his own writing. I realize that as I compile quotes from book after book, I am following in some of Pat Conroy’s footsteps. To look into the eyes of your children and to tell them you are mutilating their family and changing all their tomorrows is an act of desperate courage that I never want to repeat … It felt as though I had doused my entire family with gasoline and struck a match.” (to read the whole article, go to ) Divorces without children are minor-league divorces. “There are no metaphors powerful enough to describe the moment when you tell the children about the divorce. Nor am I certain that you can ever renounce your citizenship there. I do not know the precise day that I arrived in that country. Insanity and hopelessness grew in that land like vast orchards of malignant fruit. I entered without passport, without directions and absolutely alone. In “Requiem for a Marriage” he writes: “When I went through my divorce I saw it as a country, and it was treeless, airless there were no furloughs and no holidays. I’ve often shared the article he wrote after his first divorce. She writes with pleasure and joy, and I sit there in gloom and darkness.” “I’ve never cackled with laughter at a single line I’ve ever written. Why use any words but his own to describe Pat Conroy? His third wife Cassandra King is a “much happier” writer than he is. One blends into another, I think that’s called tragicomedy, and it’s also called Life. But they do wear with some comfort the simul-masks of tragedy and comedy. Rarely do his characters rise into states of being, pure love, joy or peace. Conroy writes elegiac sentences about everyday matters of life as well as the great horrors and tragedies. I read portions of The Prince of Tides to several Family Life Skills and Anger Management groups that I facilitated over the years. Pat Conroy has written 10 books I’ve read seven of them.
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