The Searing Wounds of Family

It was five o’clock in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time when the telephone rang in my house on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. My wife, Sallie, and I had just sat down for a drink on the porch overlooking Charleston Harbor and the Atlantic. Sallie went in to answer the telephone and I shouted, “Whoever it is, I’m not here.”

“It’s your mother,” Sallie said, returning from the phone.

“Tell her I’m dead,” I pleaded. “Please tell her I died last week and you’ve been too busy to call.”

“Please speak to her. She says it’s urgent.”

“She always says it’s urgent. It’s never urgent when she says it’s urgent.”

“I think it’s urgent this time. She’s crying.”

“When Mom cries, it’s normal. I can’t remember a day when she hasn’t been crying.”

“She's waiting, Tom.”

From The Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy

This is a book I have read three times, and every time I am devastated by its themes, by the gorgeous lyrical writing, and the deep human emotions that run entirely through it.

Could there be a more troubled, dysfunctional family than Tom Wingo's? He grew up under the shaming of an angry bitter brutal father. His mother taught him to feel the heartbeat in nature, to love the water and the island he grew up on. But she turns brooding and smothering and manipulative from wounds deep within her. Tom's brother, Luke, is a hero, a free spirit, a person of integrity and grit, but incapable of following rules he considers meaningless and oppressive. Their sister, Savannah, possesses a poet's heart and skill, but she is so desperately damaged by events you will find shocking that her brilliance is wasted in some impenetrable despair. And Tom himself, smart and funny and often tender, is nevertheless a broken man, wrestling with self loathing and rejection and things that make every man less than his potential; he gives an identity to loneliness that we don't ever forget.

The range of human urges and fears and hurts and yes triumphs in this stunning calamitous novel is something to behold. This book is like a Bible to me. I often turn to it for inspiration as a writer and truth as a human being.