And again, I’m not sure he really needs me.

Like planets circling the sun, we just keep coming back around. Pat Conroy talks a lot about circles – he believes in their power – and today as I sit on his cozy back porch, looking out over Battery Creek and the autumn-gilded marsh, it occurs to me that those of us who fall into his orbit, whenever and however that happens, tend to stay there. What can I say? Some folks just aren’t that ambitious. Pat, on the other hand, has been content to remain as he was when I first met him – a world-famous, critically celebrated, bestselling author and American icon. No longer a shop girl, I am now the proud editor of this illustrious publication. Career-wise, mine has clearly been the more stunning trajectory. In the two decades since, we both divorced and remarried, and we both left Fripp and moved into town. Looking back, though, I see we were always on strangely similar paths. Our lives meandered off in different directions. He was a wonderful boss and we became friends, but when the novel was finished, so was my job. (That would be just like him.) It was a part-time gig I spent most of my days working in a little dress shop while Pat spent his writing a book called Beach Music. To this day, I’m not sure whether he actually needed me or was just being nice. Enter the famous writer – he happened to be my neighbor – who generously offered me a job as his research assistant. I was a young newlywed living on Fripp Island, with a shiny new masters in English and nowhere to use it. My own Pat Conroy story goes back over 20 years. No matter how fast or loose the relationship, we Beaufortonians all think of Pat Conroy as ours. Or maybe you’ve just read his books, and you feel like you’ve known him forever. Maybe your association is more ephemeral – you ran into him once at Publix, or at the old Bay Street Trading Co., or in his favorite restaurant, Griffin Market. Perhaps you were in his writers’ group, or he was your neighbor on Fripp, or you still smoke cigars together on his back porch every Sunday afternoon. Maybe you played basketball together as teenagers, or he was your high school English teacher. If you’ve lived in Beaufort for any time at all, you probably have a Pat Conroy story. As his new memoir The Death of Santini floods bookstores nationwide, we bring you a free-style, freewheeling, unabridged conversation with the man whose life has been an open book.

The Death of Santini by Pat Conroy