My Reading Life Book

Five glorious, sentimental stars for Pat Conroy's memoir about books and reading.

Mr. Conroy died last month, and I picked up My Reading Life as a tribute to him. When I chose it from his list of works, I didn't realize how much I would love this gem of a book, how I would linger over the chapters, taking weeks to read it because I didn't want to return it to the library yet. Keeping this lovely book in my possession was a way of keeping Mr. Conroy around, for just a little bit longer.

The only Conroy book I had previously read was The Prince of Tides, which is a doozy of a novel and one I highly recommend if you like rich stories of southern family drama. But after reading this memoir, I want to read all of his works, especially The Great Santinti and Beach Music, two novels that meant so much to him he had nervous breakdowns while writing them.

My Reading Life has beautiful stories and descriptions of books, people and places that have meant a lot to him. My favorite chapters were about his mother and Gone With the Wind; a high school English teacher who changed his life; a bookstore owner who begrudgingly became his friend; his stories about being a military brat; his love letters to Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey; his tribute to Tolstoy; and an explanation of why he writes.

One section that was particularly moving was a conversation he had with a grouchy book rep, named Norman Berg. Conroy had just published his memoir The Water is Wide, and Berg thought Conroy could do better:


"Don't you want to matter?" Norman Berg asked me ... "Don't you want to be part of the literary discussion? Don't you think about your place in literature?"

"No, I haven't thought about any of that, Mr. Berg."

"Then what do you want?" he asked me. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I want to to be remembered."


Reading that weeks after Conroy's death gave me pause, to be sure.

This is a memoir made for readers, especially if you appreciate thoughtful passages and ornate descriptions, and I just adored it. Cheers to you, Mr. Conroy. I will remember you.

Favorite Quotes
"[My mother] read so many books that she was famous among the librarians in every town she entered. Since she did not attend college, she looked to librarians as her magic carpet into a serious intellectual life. Books contained powerful amulets that could lead to paths of certain wisdom. Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human. She was sure that if she could find the right book, it would reveal what was necessary for her to become a woman of substance and parts."

"From the beginning I've searched out those writers unafraid to stir up the emotions, who entrust me with their darkest passions, their most indestructible yearnings, and their most soul-killing doubts. I trust the great novelists to teach me how to live, how to feel, how to love and hate. I trust them to show me the dangers I will encounter on the road as I stagger on my own troubled passage through a complicated life of books that try to reach me how to die."

"If there is more important work than teaching, I hope to learn about it before I die."

"When I pick up a book, the prayer that rises out of me is that it changes me utterly and that I am not the man who first selected that book from a well-stocked shelf."

"Wolfe writes like a man on fire who does not have a clue how not to be on fire. Yes, I see the flaws of Thomas Wolfe and I could not care less. His art is overdone and yet I find it incomparably beautiful." [Similarly, I can see the flaws of Conroy, but it doesn't bother me. I appreciate the beauty in his work.]

"Tolstoy performs that rarest and most valuable of tasks, one that has all but disappeared from modern fiction. He wrestles with the philosophical issues of how people like you and me can manage to live praiseworthy and constructive lives. Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, stories experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it."

"Some American writers are meaner than serial killers, but far more articulate, and this is always the great surprise awaiting the young men and women who swarm to the universities, their heads buzzing with all the dazzle and freshness and humbuggery of the language itself."

"My mother's voice and my father's fists are the two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art."

"My hunt will always be for my mother. She could not give me herself, but she gave me literature as a replacement. I have no idea who she was, and I write my books as a way of finding out."

"I have tried to read two hundred pages every day of my life since I was a freshman in high school, because I knew that I would come to the writing of books without the weight of culture and learning that a well-established, confidently placed family could offer its children. I collected those long, melancholy lists of the great books that high school English teachers passed out to college-bound students, and I relied on having consumed those serious litanies of books as a way to ease my way into the literary life. Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the necessary discipline for a novelist who burns with the ambition to get better."

"Here is all I ask of a book ' give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word."