The Prince of Tides (1986)

I liked this book and Conroy's use of language. The Wingo family, a poor family, living on the coast of South Carolina, is as dysfunctional as you can get. The father is a great shrimper and his children know the waters like the back of their hand. He is married to a beautiful woman who is never satisfied. He is also abusive towards his wife and children. Tom Wingo and his sister, Savanah, are twins. She grows up to be a great poet living in New York, but she is also a tortured soul who has again tried to kill herself. Tom spends the summer in New York talking to her doctor talking about their life as his sister doesn't remember much of it. The family has gone through a lot including home invasion and rape. I enjoyed the book a lot.

Conroy uses his difficult Southern childhood and adolescence as the basis for themes of Southern culture, parental and sibling relationships, spirituality and survival. Brilliant writing. (not for sensitive readers)
Read this years ago and the feelings I had reading it have stayed with me. ( )

The "Gothic Southern Novel" needs it's own star system. It just doesn't fit on the shelves with the other novels. I was swept along with the tides of the Carolina shores. A long tale of southern families, shoddy and grand (I'll let you decide which is which) sprinkled with a bit of the hard-edged glamour of Manhattan super-successors.

I was engaged by this novel and much of it teased out memories of my own southern family and it's idiosyncrasies.

The came at last and a little too prettied up, but end it must. ( )

I fell in love with this book. Conroy’s turns of phrase and descriptions are beautiful. I was elated when the good things happened and depressed when the bad things happened. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work. ( )

Tom Wingo, who had a mental breakdown resulting in his coaching job loss, travels to New York after his poet sister's suicide attempt. He spends a lot of time with his sister's therapist, Dr. Lowenstein, describing their dysfunctional family, a horrible sex crime committed against multiple family members, and the family's strangeness. I did not enjoy this book. I have never viewed the movie. Some plot features lack plausibility. I love the South Carolina Low Country, but I did not like the family he described or really any of the characters in either South Carolina or New York. ( )