Guest post: "A giant of the writing world has died…Pat Conroy" by Ian A. O’Connor
Why
do I mourn for a man I never met but admired from afar for over forty
years? Pat Conroy and Ian O’Connor had little
in common other than the fact we both came of age in a turbulent time—the
1960s. And we both loved books. I learned later that he read two hundred pages
every day from an early age on, and that his memory was prodigious. It had to
have been, for no other author I can think of had the power to produce a string
of pearls with every sentence he wrote. We all know that good writing stems
from incessant reading, and his writing just begged to be savored like a rare
American bourbon whiskey. Sipped slowly, swirled around on the palate for an
eternity, and then begrudgingly swallowed. This will be repeated until the book
is read or the bourbon finished.
My
first Pat Conroy story was The Great
Santini, and I almost took a pass on it because the title didn’t grab me
and the cover art was terrible. But the friend who lent it to me mentioned the
story was about a son growing up in a fighter pilot’s household, and that singular
fact sealed the deal. I had just come off of five years active duty as an Air
Force officer, was still in the reserves, and loved to fly airplanes. By the end of the novel I had grown to hate
the Great Santini, aka Bull Meecham, the father-figure to the novel’s eldest
son, Ben, and stand-in for Conroy’s own mean-spirited, heartless, selfish dad. I had discovered one of the great writers of
our time.
I
read The Boo and The Water is Wide,
his only other published works at the time, and then kept a weather-eye peeled
for his novels as they were published. The
Lords of Discipline, was next, followed by The Prince of Tides, Beach
Music, The Pat Conroy Cookbook, My Losing Season, South of Broad, My Reading Life, and
lastly, The Death of Santini. Each masterpiece
was better than the one before it, (if that’s possible) but I oftentimes felt
he wasn’t writing enough stories for me to enjoy. Unbeknownst to him, he had
become my literary mentor, harkening from the time I began my writer’s journey
in the mid-1970s until today. As we both grew old, my novels improved as I read
each new work of his. I earned my Masters, then finally my Ph.D., under his
tutelage, and the price of admission into his prestigious writing program was
nothing more than the cost of his next book. The entire curriculum took me
forty years to complete and, in an unexplainable coincidence, I graduated the same
day he died.
Pat
Conroy and I differed in one respect. He never gave up using pencils and yellow
legal pads in the crafting of his stories, while I, on the other hand, fell in
love with my computer’s wordsmithing capabilities in the early eighties. From
everything I’ve read, whenever he presented a new manuscript to Nan Talese—an
editor with her own prestigious imprint—it would invariably run to as many as
two thousand handwritten pages. She edited The
Prince of Tides, then other editors followed as the manuscripts were
completed. Conroy and his editors would spend weeks paring the work down to a
publishable size. I am in awe of how Nan Talese was able to find within herself
the mettle to give final approval to delete so many bejeweled pages of his
prose…..but she did, book after book, and soon thereafter, another Pat Conroy bestseller
was born.
And
now the candle has been extinguished. Pat, you made my life immeasurably richer
with your stories, so farewell, rest in peace, and forgive me for closing this
tribute with a co-opting of your trademark book-signing catchphrase, “For the love of books.”
Author: Ian A. O’Connor
Release Date: March 31, 2016
Publisher: Pegasus Publishing & Entertainment Group
Pages: 280
Genre: Historical Medical Crime
Format: Trade paperback and EBook
Purchase on Amazon
Book Description
“An intimate look at a life lived as a lie.” – Kirkus Reviews
Inspired by a true story, The Wrong Road Home is the story of Desmond Donahue. Born into abject poverty in Ireland, Donahue went on to successfully practice his craft as a surgeon for 20 years—first in Ireland and then the United States. So isn’t Donahue’s tale a classic rags-to-riches, American dream story? Hardly. Donahue was girded with nothing more than a Chicago School System GED and several counterfeit medical diplomas. It seems impossible—and understandably so—but it’s a story based on a Miami Herald Sunday edition front page exposé. An Oprah producer pursued the imposter for weeks, as did Bill O’Reilly. Simply put, Desmond Donahue’s story is a story that really happened.
A gripping story that is alternately shocking, heartbreaking, and unbelievable, The Wrong Road Home will leave readers spellbound. Ian A. O’Connor, an imaginative and skillful storyteller, paints a vivid portrait of a complicated, complex character who comes alive within the story’s pages. Reminiscent of Catch Me if You Can, The Wrong Road Homefuses elements of true crime, memoir, and drama. Groundbreaking, inventive and innovative, The Wrong Road Home is an extraordinary story exceptionally well told.
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