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A lowcountry heart : reflections on a writing life
A new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by pieces from the author's many friends.
Book
Thick but thin
PAT Conroy is not an unknown author in this country; at the very least, readers will be familiar with his previous novel, The Prince of Tides, either in book form or as the Barbra Streisand-Nick Nolte film of a few years ago. It was a marvellous novel, a real page-turner peopled with larger-than-life characters and even a full-grown tiger. In spite of this, Conroy kept the story human, managing somehow not to sensationalise the sensational. The narrator, Jack McCall, is a native of South Carolina. He is a football coach, a travel writer, a gourmet chef, and a widower singlehandedly raising his beautiful, wise, sensitive daughter Leah. His (also) beautiful, wise, sensitive but sadly troubled wife Shyla had committed suicide a few years before. Her parents blamed Jack for the suicide, and fought a bitter legal battle to get custody of Leah. Deeply hurt and seemingly permanently scarred by this action, Jack, who is given custody of his daughter, flees with her to Rome, to start a new life completely divorced from the pain and suffering he associates with South Carolina. It works for a while, but eventually a series of visitors from home, as well as news that his mother is terminally ill, persuades him to go back to his birthplace and introduce Leah to what it means to be a South Carolinian. Jack eventually makes peace with his parents, his brothers, his in-laws, the hated father of his best friend, an equally hated ex-close friend, etc., etc., and everything ends pretty happily.
Newspaper Article
