"Pat Conroy makes things up," the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist informed an overflow crowd Sunday at the North Carolina Festival of the Book. Conroy, he said, became one of the most famous writers in America through a novel about his cruel authoritarian father, "The Great Santini."

"Don Conroy was not a Marine," Marlette said, "but an insurance adjustor. His nickname was not 'the Great Santini,' but 'Scooter.' "

As laughter percolated through Duke University's Page Auditorium, Marlette explained that while Conroy has written so movingly about his difficult college years at the manly military milieu of The Citadel, he is in fact a graduate of a women's college, Bryn Mawr. Sitting next to Marlette on the stage, Conroy managed to keep a straight face, even as his face turned from tomato to beet red.

"And Pat did not play basketball in college," Marlette said, then paused before delivering the punch line that brought down the house: "He played lacrosse." When the laughter subsided, he added, "Though his real passions were polo and synchronized swimming."

When Marlette finally ended his "expose," Conroy deadpanned, "I knew it was a mistake to come here."

This playful warmth reflected the mood at the book festival, which concluded Sunday. Rather than have writers read and describe their work, festival organizers seated groups of two to four panelists in green rocking chairs and asked them to hold intimate conversations, as though they were on a porch during a summer evening. The result was a strange and wonderful thing in this era of the confrontational sound bite: smart, lively and polite discussion that managed to be both scintillating and respectful.

"We're having a wonderful time," said Jill Kirby of Raleigh, who attended the festival with a member of her book club, Janis Hansen. "We've gone to lots of bookstore readings, and it was great to hear the writers in conversation, talking about how they develop their ideas."

Hansen said she especially enjoyed hearing Elizabeth Spencer talk with Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas, who turned Spencer's novella, "The Light in the Piazza," into a Broadway show. "It was a thrill to hear Adam Guettel play a number from the show on the piano."

The festival went off without any glaring glitches. Although a few attendees were turned away from Barbara Kingsolver's keynote address Thursday because the Duke Chapel was filled to capacity, supply and demand were generally at happy equilibrium. Most of the 45 presentations -- from low-key affairs featuring poets such as Elizabeth Alexander or Michael McFee to the headliner performances by Tom Wolfe and Kaye Gibbons -- attracted near-capacity crowds.

As expected, the festival drew between 8,000 and 12,000 people, said its director, Aaron Greenwald.

It was hard not to notice two things about the crowd: white skin and gray hair.

"I know it's reading period, but I was hoping to see more students here," Greenwald said. "And we would have liked to see more African-Americans in attendance. We worked hard to have a fair proportion of African-American participants, but I think that effort is something we have to build through sustained outreach in the years ahead."

Two years, to be exact. That's how long organizers have to build on the success of this year's North Carolina Festival of the Book before the next one takes place on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill in 2008. For Triangle book lovers, those will be two long years.