Reading Rec: My Losing Season by Pat Conroy
Y’all know how much I love reading, so I’m thrilled to kick off a recommended reads section here on my blog. Today I'm recommending Pat Conroy's, My Losing Season.
This book is absolutely superb! I cannot believe that it took me so long to find and devour this incredible piece of writing. Oh yes, it’s ostensibly about Conroy’s fourth and final basketball season at The Citadel and the travails of his almost sometimes pretty good but not just quite combination of teammates and coaches.
The backdrop of Viet Nam, the brutal knob system at El Cid and racism, sexism and stoicism are but part of this panorama of struggle and fear and yes, courage in the face of twisted adversities. Written in 2002, it further amplified Conroy’s lengthy, bitter estrangement from The Military College of South Carolina, a place he both hated and loved, and was followed by the upheaval caused by a group of women pounding on the gates of the school which
emphatically and brutishly prided itself on ‘Mens Room ONLY’ mind-set.
Toss in his obscenely cruel, son of a bitch father and it is a witches brew that entices, draws in and finally consumes the reader. Conroy’s writing is at times laugh out loud funny, often raw, sad, melancholy and bitter and constantly portrays a confused young mann trying to figure it all out. His ability to bring his feelings and emotions to the fore is simply remarkable and his ability to do the same with the cast of odd-ball and ‘normal’ characters that swirl about him is no less successful.
Conroy, in searching for himself and his life, literally intellectually and mentally turns himself inside out so we can do his complete autopsy while he is diving and soaring, optimistic and darkly depressed. His self-candor is an honest and gut-ripping exercise in great writing. I have read a few other of his books, always found him to be masterful and too, even beyond the genre of ‘Southern’-though indeed he is so.
In one way, I regret I never had a chance to meet him or hear him speak; in another, MY LOSING SEASON has imbedded him in my mind so much more and permanently than any brief encounter might have done. I get to see him as I think he was and that combination of his fact and my fiction is comfortably welcomed and enables my curiosity even further.
Conroy died in 2016 in Beaufort, South Carolina, a place that he loved so. I have made a few literary pilgrimages in my time, even in France to stare upon the homes of Victor Hugo and Georges Clemenceau. A trip to Beaufort is now in soon order. He was a Giant and this is a marvelous book. I wish he were still alive so I could falteringly try to pen him a mash note..
Obviously, I did not ever know him but damn, I sure do miss him.
If you order this one, please do so from your local indie via Bookshop.org!