Pat conroy siblings

“I don’t believe in happy families. A family is too frail a vessel to contain the risks of all the warring impulses expressed when such a group meets on common ground. If a family gathers in harmony for a reunion, everyone in attendance will know the entry-ways and exits have been mined with improvised explosive devices.” So says the novelist Pat Conroy. As the holidays are upon us, with dysfunctional family get-togethers gathering like storm clouds on our tinsel-taut, Nutcracker-bedecked horizons, there is no better time to review Conroy’s wrenching and starkly humorous family memoir, The Death of Santini.

Conroy first burst onto bestseller lists in 1976 with The Great Santini, a blazing, thinly veiled roman à clef about his father, a highly-decorated Marine fighter pilot who ruled and abused the Conroy family while deploying to fight in three wars during his military career. Conroy exorcised his childhood demons in vivid deta Poet carol conroy biography!