Conversations with the Conroys: Interviews with Pat Conroy and His Family

About this book

Revealing interviews with Pat Conroy and four of his siblings offer fans a look inside the authors life and career A New York Times best-selling author of eleven novels and memoirs Pat Conroy is one of Americas most beloved storytellers and a writer as synonymous with the South Carolina lowcountry as pluff mud or the Palmetto tree. As Conroys writings have been rooted in autobiography more often than not his readers have come to know and appreciate much about the once-secret dark familial history that has shaped Conroys life and work. Conversations with the Conroys opens further the discussion of the Conroy family through five revealing interviews conducted in 2014 with Pat Conroy and four of his six siblings: brothers Mike Jim and Tim and sister Kathy. In confessional and often comic dialogs the Conroys openly discuss the perils of being raised by their larger-than-life parents USMC fighter pilot Col. Don Conroy (the Great Santini) and southern belle Peggy Conroy (ne Peek); the complexities of having their history of abuse made public by Pats books; the tragic death of their youngest brother Tom; the chasm between them and their sister Carol Ann; and the healing redemptive embrace they have come to find over time in one another. With good humor and often-striking candor these interviews capture the Conroys as authentic and indeed proud South Carolinians not always at ease with their place in literary lore but nonetheless deeply supportive of Pat in his life and writing. Edited and introduced by the Palmetto States preeminent historian Walter Edgar Conversations with the Conroys includes the first publications of Pat Conroys interview with Edgar as the keynote address of the 2014 One Book One Columbia citywide "big read" program the unprecedented interview with the Conroy siblings for SCETV Radios Walter Edgars Journal the resulting live Conroy Family Roundtable held at the 2014 South Carolina Book Festival and a recent interview in Charleston following Pat Conroys induction into the Citadels Athletics Hall of Fame. This collection is augmented with an afterword from National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney and nearly fifty photographs many from the Pat Conroy Archive in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections University of South Carolina Libraries and published here for the first time. Through the resulting treasure trove of text and images this volume is as much a keepsake for Conroys legion of devoted fans as it is a wealth of insider information to broaden the understanding of readers and researchers alike of the idiosyncratic world of Pat Conroy and his family.