“If you ever see me with a Kindle, shoot me in the back of the head.”Ĭonroy laughs about the electronic reader, but it’s clear he sees himself as sort of a literary dinosaur. “It seems like reading is going in different directions than I ever thought it would,” he says. Instead, it celebrates the book, something the 65-year-old Conroy fears may be endangered. Donald Conroy.īut “My Reading Life” doesn’t stray into that territory. His book “The Great Santini,” made into a movie starring Robert Duvall, centered on a physically and emotionally abusive father, based on Conroy’s father, Marine Col. She said that reading was the key to getting out of all we were born into.”Īnyone who has read Conroy’s acclaimed books knows that he was trying desperately to escape what he was born into. She taught us to read everything, to know everything, to be aware of everything. “That voice has sustained me and sustained my writing career. “I can still hear her voice reading to me,” Conroy adds. Her way out of it, and her children’s way out of it, is that she read ferociously and read to us every night of our lives. “She was raised as poor as you could be in the South during the Depression.

“It is basically an homage to my mother, an Alabama girl,” says Conroy, whose mother came from Piedmont, Ala. He’s writing about that love for literature in “My Reading Life,” a collection of essays about the books that have filled the author’s life since his childhood.

“I try to get that done before I go to bed at night. “I’m a little superstitious about it,” Conroy says. Spurred on by a challenge by a “glorious” high-school English teacher, the author of books such as “The Great Santini,” “The Lords of Discipline” and “The Prince of Tides” tries to read 200 pages a day.

My reading life by pat conroy