Ten years after his death, Pat Conroy hovers over his literary festival | Opinion

Pat Conroy would have been 80 this month.

He died nearly 10 years ago, a few months after turning 70, not long after giving what is now seen as his own eulogy before fans at the “Conroy at 70 Literary Festival” in Beaufort in October 2015.

In that brief talk, Conroy said that — while his life, like his best-selling novels, had many chapters filled with pain — he had been lucky with family, friends and especially readers.

“I’ve written the books,” he said, “because I thought that if I explained my own life, somehow, I could explain some of your life to you.”

Readers flocked to him.

“You will come up to me and you’ll say, ‘My father was the Great Santini.’ Or even more horrifying, you’ll say, ‘My mother was the Great Santini,’” Conroy said at his 70th birthday festival.

Now they will flock again to Beaufort, the “Queen of the Sea Islands” that adopted Conroy when he moved to town in high school, the son of a Marine fighter pilot he would later fictionalize in “The Great Santini,” and found a home and soul.

His 70th birthday celebration turned into an annual event following Conroy’s death on March 4, 2016. This year, the 10th annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival will be held Oct. 23-26 in Beaufort, sponsored by the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort. It will feature National Book Award winner Jason Mott and Patti Callahan Henry in conversation with Conroy’s widow and fellow writer, Cassandra King.

King believes that when her husband gave his unscheduled remarks about his work and his life to close the first literary festival in 2015 he may have had an inkling of the cancer that would claim his life in four short months.

“It may have been like a premonition or something, and I wish to God it could have been different,” she said. “I wish that he could have lived to be a grumpy old man.”

Ten years later, she still really misses him. She misses his takes on current events. She laughs to think about the blistering letters to the editor he would be firing off about banned books and bullied librarians.

She’s also still learning about his generosity, how he once sent a check to a bookseller whose store was damaged by a hurricane, or a long response to a reader who’d written him.

“I’ve also seen how beloved he was,” she said. “One reason we wanted to create the Pat Conroy Literary Center was to carry on a living legacy of his love of reading, writing and educational endeavors and things like that.

“We had no idea whatsoever that if we built it, they would come. It just was a total gamble. We started very small, and we have just had an amazing response.”

Beyond the annual festival, the nonprofit center hosts more than 100 literary events and attracts 4,000 visitors each year.

She said his books continue to sell, and everything he published has been optioned for a potential screenplay. She’s working on a cookbook, which was an idea they shared, and at one time planned to pursue together.

Conroy also left behind the draft of what could potentially be a series of books for pre-teens. She said that’s a vintage Conroy story.

His second-oldest daughter Melissa Conroy is an author, artist and textile designer who has published two children’s picture books. She wanted her dad to write a children’s book that she could illustrate.

“We will do anything for our kids, so we told her he would do it,” King said. “Four hundred pages later....”

What hits home hardest for King is that Conroy was right: His readers made him the luckiest of writers.

For years after he died, she said, people would “burst into tears telling me how much they love his writing.” She said a lot of people have told her, “One of my great regrets is that I never met him and told him how much his writing had changed my life.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at lauderdalecolumn@gmail.com.