Pat Conroy is buried on a little island near his home on the South Carolina mainland, in the modest cemetery of a Baptist church in the Gullah community that “graciously allowed a non-Baptist, non-African American writer to rest among them.” This simple fact seems the perfect final check mark for a creative artist who did just about everything he set out to do, and did it all with openness, articulation and flair.

This latest selection of his writings --- one hesitates to say final, since Conroy was prolific and there are 200 pages of a last novel waiting to be tackled --- is strung together loosely by the author’s blog posts. Hating the word “blog” but advised by his publishers that he must develop one, Conroy took it as a challenge. He began to use it as one part journal, two parts outreach to a readership that might reach back. According to his wife and fellow author Cassandra King, who contributes an introduction to the book, fans who met Conroy for the first time would often burst into tears, and if anyone had a good story to tell, he would shamelessly threaten to “steal” it.

"Conroy can still, and will always, remind us that gentility is more than accent and birthright; it comes from within and is best when shared."

Conroy, for his part, admired his wife’s writing and touted it on his blog posts that always began, “Hey out there,” and ended, “Great love…” He acknowledges his age as he admits that his memories, at a certain point, have become as real to him as his daily life. He feeds his fans yet more tidbits about his strangely privileged but undeniably dysfunctional youth with the mother he regarded as little less than a saint and his father, the legendary Great Santini, a cold-hearted tyrant who, in later years, grew more malleable. There are vignettes of fellow writers, always complimentary, and many occasions for celebrating Lowcountry life and events around his chosen haunts in Beaufort.

Conroy speaks of his “lifetime love affair with English teachers,” which could be extruded to encompass a love of language that has made him one of the most admired writers of his generation, southern or otherwise. He admits that there is always some fiction in a memoir and “discord has always been my theme.” Though he could and did kill off some real people in his writings, he also had the power to reincarnate the ones who were worthy of it.

Conroy can still, and will always, remind us that gentility is more than accent and birthright; it comes from within and is best when shared. He graciously acknowledges his readers, calling them a “magic audience.” Surely the feeling is mutual; his writing brought magic moments to us all.