A review by andyc_elsby232
My Losing Season: A Memoir by Pat Conroy

4.0

You can sense a phantom of suffering and failure passing through Pat Conroy's hands as he wrote this miserable book. A damn good book, yes, but one of the most miserable and brutal I've read. I didn't come to this book to read about basketball (I've been to about a dozen games in my life and have never gotten into it), I came to soak in Conroy's unabashedly sensitive, soulful, lyrical command of language. 75% of this memoir is all basketball matches where you know more often than not the teller of the tale will lose and then lose some more (hence the title), but Conroy transforms these pitiful displays of sporting (f**k it) into momentous, Godly encounters. Do they overreach and almost embarrass the reader with their self-importance? Sure, but did my heart race when success actually popped it's head during rare, mercilessly brief intervals? Absolutely. The book puts you in the blackest prison of Pat Conroy's seemingly endless parade of abuses and let-downs and makes you kiss the feet of any goodwill that shines through. It's a very problematic book, but for the countless number of times I was moved, shaken, and gripped by this narrative of a ticking-time-bomb of a human being struggling to enter adulthood a good person, I'd call it great.