Pat Conroy
Less than a year after the publication of South of Broad, Pat Conroy has signed a deal to write My Life in Books, a nonfiction account of the “people, writers and books that made him into the reader and writer he is today, from Tolstoy to Thomas Wolfe and beyond,” according to an announcement yesterday in Publisher’s Marketplace.
This will not be the best-selling author’s first foray into nonfiction. The Water Is Wide (1972) is based on his experiences as a schoolteacher, and in 2002, Conroy published My Losing Season, a memoir inspired by his senior year season as starting point guard on The Citadel’s basketball team. In 2004, he published The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life, which includes personal stories in addition to recipes.
No doubt My Life in Books will be eagerly anticipated; Conroy is a favorite of BookPage readers—South of Broad was our cover story in August (read a review of this “lush, remarkable new novel”), and we interviewed him in 2002 about My Losing Season.
I wonder how the book will be organized—chronologically based on what he was reading when? By author that inspired him? When Gay Talese (the husband of Conroy’s editor, coincidentally) described some of the stories and inspiration behind his books in 2006’s A Writer’s Life, I thought the result was a bit disjointed; he bounced from anecdote to anecdote, with long digressions thrown in. I hope Conroy’s book has a clearer narrative structure.
Will you read My Life in Books?
Definitely! I read everything Pat Conroy writes and I also read a lot of books about writing, so this is double super for me!
Absolutely.
Wouldn’t miss it!
Will I read it?! Can’t WAIT to read it!
I’d heard about this book earlier this year. Yay! I will definitely be reading it. (I’d just finished SOUTH OF BROAD and did a search for reviews and found my way to your cool site!)
Bring it on!!
Most definitely. I love Pat Conroy’s writing … have read each and every book that’s been published under his name and I look forward to the next. It is easy to tell his books come from Mr. Conroy’s internal pain but, on each and every page, the reader also experiences the literary beauty that transends it.