Perspective: Pat Conroy said he was 'the most falsely open man' I’d ever met. He was right. The acclaimed writer was an unreliable narrator of his own life.
By Michael Mewshaw March 1 at 10:43 AM In 1981, five years after publishing his searing autobiographical novel “The Great Santini,” Pat Conroy pitched up in Rome and called me, claiming a book critic at The Washington Post had passed along my name and number. No sooner had we met than Pat confessed that he had fibbed. A mother at my son’s school suggested that he contact me, having thought that as writers we should become friends.
There was, however, a darker side that bound us more deeply than superficial similarities. Raised in Irish Catholic families, bred to be altar boys , we admitted that our home lives had been made hellish by alcohol and violent abuse. Pat asked me straight off to describe the worst thing my parents ever did to me, and I revealed that when I was a kid, my mother smashed my head against a wall. He topped me, telling of the time his father lifted him by the throat and beat his skull against a wall.
I didn’t ask why he was telling us this. I didn’t ask how nobody had noticed the herpes until now. I didn’t ask why he was worried about other women. The story was too grotesquely detailed, I thought, to be untrue. I sided with Pat, and didn’t learn until decades later that it was Pat, not Lenore, who had herpes. Doctors discovered this a month before Susannah’s birth and advised Lenore to have a Caesarean as a precaution.
So I called Lenore and never laid eyes on Pat Conroy again. For six years he ghosted me, refusing to reply to phone calls, letters or messages from mutual friends. Gutted, confused, I suffered Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance. Oh, yes, and one other emotion, humiliation. I learned that I hadn’t been Pat’s first choice. He had importuned a doctor in Atlanta to play messenger boy for him.
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