In ‘My Reading Life,' Conroy details how he found writing

In other words, to everyone and everything that contributed to Conroy’s dream of becoming a writer who would make “the English language ... pitch and roll, soar ... reverse its field at will, howl and reel in the darkness, bellow when frightened and pray when it approaches the eminence or divinity of nature itself.”

The payoff takes the form of Conroy’s most confessional offering to date, each of its 15 chapters a veritable valentine to the books he loved and the people in his life who loved books.

Tucked into these starry-eyed love notes are puzzle pieces that eventually form a self-portrait of a desperately lonely boy who threw himself at the literary life with the passion of someone in the grips of a heart-pounding, incapacitating, stutter-inducing crush. This appealing condition, which persisted into adulthood, is the irresistible basis of “My Reading Life.”

“I was born to be in a library,” Conroy says, and that’s where it all begins.

An Army brat, Conroy never lived long enough anywhere to make friends; his mother filled that slot. As a result of her belief that she had never gotten enough education, Peg camped out at the public library in every new town and took Pat with her. “To my mother, a library was a palace of desire masquerading in a wilderness of books,” Conroy writes. “She distributed books to me as though they were communion wafers.”

Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” was Peg’s bible, and she read it in its entirety, out loud, to her son every year from the time he was 5 until he left home; little wonder it was the book Conroy claims made him want to write. In describing its enduring popularity and the way Mitchell’s book has outlived its critics, his glee is unmistakable -- he is his Southern mother’s son -- but he also sees its flaws clearly when he notes, “No black man or woman can read this book and be sorry this particular wind has gone.”

Peg’s legacy was the voracious appetite her son brought to reading. But Conroy’s unerring gift for recognizing exactly what he needed to build his literary career was all his own.

With his only male role model an abusive, loutish father, Conroy set his sights on Gene Norris, his high school English teacher, a cultured, poetic and open-minded gentleman who had nothing in common with Don Conroy. In his delightful tribute to Norris, Conroy brings his old mentor onstage to grouse about the syrupy flattery, the better to remind him that he was the knight in shining armor “who found a profoundly shy and battered young man and changed the course of his life with the extravagant passion he brought to his classroom.”

In 1973, an incurable sense that he was “a half-baked, mediocre thinker” drew Conroy to owner Cliff Graubart’s Old New York Book Shop in Atlanta, the “second home” and “university” that finally provided “the understanding, the sheer depth of culture I’d need if I were to touch the sourceless, incandescent seas that roared inside me.”

But it’s undoubtedly Wolfe, the author of “Look Homeward, Angel,” who became Conroy’s greatest guru and in whose novels he found “the home territory of what would become my literary terrain.” In his paean to Wolfe, Conroy pulls out all the stops, confessing the embarrassing extent of his youthful worship -- “My winds all howled and my rivers all roared out of the high hills” -- then wryly admitting that the fustian influence has never worn off: “It is a well-known fact that I will carefully select four silvery, difficult-to-digest adjectives when one lean, Anglo-Saxon adjective will suffice.”

Conroy’s infatuation with fellow Georgian Dickey is no less spectacular. The white-water rafting incident that follows Conroy’s reading of “Deliverance” is worth the price of the book, with its memorable cliffhanger, “So I went down the Chattooga rifleless with Jan Hryharrow, who told me he could take a six-month-old child down the river and the infant would not even get wet.”

Needless to say, in this marvelous blueprint for how to engage with all things literary, the goal is not only to get wet, but to fall deeply and madly in over our heads. With its heady mix of memoir, advice and out-and-out lust for the written word, “My Reading Life” asks how we could possibly settle for anything less.

Nonfiction

"My Reading Life"

Pat Conroy

Nan A. Talese; 352 pages; $25