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The Death Of Santini
Pat Conroy
The Story of a Father and His Son
Nan A. Talese
November 2013
On Sale: October 29, 2013
352 pages
ISBN: 0385530900
EAN: 9780385530903
Kindle: B00CNQ7MJG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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 who were dragged from military base
to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the
toll his father’s behavior took on his siblings, and
especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat’s lifeline to a
better world—that of books and culture. But eventually,
despite repeated confrontations with his father, Pat managed
to claw his way toward a life he could have only imagined as
a child. Pat’s great success as
a writer has always been intimately linked with the
exploration of his family history. While the publication of
The Great Santini brought Pat much acclaim, the rift
it caused with his father brought even more attention. Their
long-simmering conflict burst into the open, fracturing an
already battered family. But as Pat tenderly chronicles
here, even the oldest of wounds can heal. In the final years
of Don Conroy’s life, he and his son reached a rapprochement
of sorts. Quite unexpectedly, the Santini who had freely
doled out physical abuse to his wife and children refocused
his ire on those who had turned on Pat over the years. He
defended his son’s honor. The
Death of Santini is at once a heart-wrenching account of
personal and family struggle and a poignant lesson in how
the 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, lending significance to one of the most-often quoted
lines from Pat’s bestselling novel The Prince of
Tides: “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.”
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