Pat Conroy memoir revisits his dad, 'the Great Santini'

• An abusive dad whose job was %22to kill our nation%27s enemies%22
• A memoir inspired by a brush with death
• Next%3A A novel dealing with a war Conroy didn%27t fight

NEW YORK — In his new memoir, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son, Pat Conroy confesses, "I hated my father long before I knew there was a word for hate."

Donald Conroy, a highly decorated Marine pilot who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, lived by a warrior's code. His son says, "Dad's job description was to kill our nation's enemies, and nothing in his job hinted at any obligation to be a good father or husband."

Now, 15 years after his father's death, Conroy, who turns 68 on Saturday, is asked if he misses him.

"A great deal," he says with a crooked smile. ''I miss how we argued and fought. I miss his total lack of modesty. I miss how, despite everything, he could make me laugh."

Conroy's dad nicknamed himself after joining the Marines after Pearl Harbor and learning to fly. One day, after practicing aerial acrobatics over Lake Michigan, he announced to his squadron, "I was better than the Great Santini today."

The nickname, borrowed from a death-defying trapeze artist he had seen as a boy, stuck.

It became the title of his son's 1976 novel about a heroic but abusive Marine who beat his wife and children and was impossible to please.

Conroy, the oldest of seven kids, says his father was actually worse than the fictional and tyrannical Col. Bull Meecham.

But a strange thing happened after the novel became a movie starring Robert Duvall.

"My dad, always in denial, treated it all as fiction, like I had made it all up, not toned it down. To prove that, he reinvented himself. After my mother divorced him (in 1975) he had the best second act I ever saw. He became the best uncle, the best brother, the best grandfather, the best friend."

Conroy decided to write the memoir (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, on sale Tuesday) "as a kind of summary" two years ago when he thought he was dying.

In an interview at his publisher's office, Conroy off-handedly mentions he had trouble with his heart, liver and kidney and was retaining fluid.

His doctor removed 11 pounds of fluid in 10 minutes, he says. "It could be a diet book: Eleven Pounds in Ten Minutes: The Conroy Diet."

After two divorces, Conroy's third wife, novelist Cassandra King, "got him "to clean up my life," as he puts it. "Eat better and stop drinking."

He's still hefty, with rosy cheeks, deep blue eyes and a hearty laugh. He married King a week after his father's death in 1998, and credits her for "a long repair job on the shape and architecture of a troubled soul."

In his memoir, Conroy writes, "I don't believe in happy families." One of his siblings committed suicide. Four others, including himself, have been suicidal at one time or another, he reports. And he's estranged from his 31-year-old daughter, Susannah, who's mentioned in his acknowledgments with an invitation: "The door is always open and so is my heart."

But what if he had a happier childhood? Would he still have become a writer?

"I hope so," he says. When he talks to writing students, "some seem to envy me, that I had a terrible dad and this ridiculous family that gave me so much to write about."

He tells them, "Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling."

Had he grown up happier, "I probably would be a different writer, maybe a kind of sun-struck Florida novelist like Carl Hiaasen, who's so hilarious."

Conroy can be funny, but in a melancholy way. As for his writing style, he writes, "There are other writers who try for subtle and minimalists effects, but I don't travel in that tribe."

His memoir is Conroy's first book since My Reading Life, a collection of essays published in 2010. Kirkus Reviews calls The Death of Santini "the moving true story of an unforgivable father and his unlikely redemption." It's one of 10 titles on the latest LibraryReads, a national staff picks list.

Jennifer Dayton of the Darien (Conn.) Public Library says, "Conroy's amazing voice is back and makes me realize how much I have missed hearing it. ... Happily, this is not anything close to a pity party, but rather a lesson about how redemptive the powers of love and humor can be."

After Conroy's last two novels landed high on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list (Beach Music at No. 1 in 1995 and South of Broad at No. 2 in 2009), he's working on a novel set in Charleston, S.C., during the Vietnam War.

"My characters go to Vietnam, which I did not." (He got a draft deferment.) "But I had a lot of classmates at The Citadel who did. From those who returned, I'm going to steal their stories about the war and the madness they brought back home."

(The Citadel, the Southern military academy, inspired The Lords of Discipline, his 1980 novel about love, brutality and racism, adapted as a movie starring David Keith.)

With a smile, he confesses, "I always steal the stories of my friends and family. Around me, no one is safe."