Cassandra King Conroy’s Memoir
Tell Me A Story: My Life With Pat Conroy
story by CAROL LAUVRAY photos by JOHN WOLLWERTH
“Who wouldn’t want to know what it was like to be married to Pat Conroy, one of the greatest writers to ever spring forth from the Lowcountry of South Carolina? Cassandra, his widow, takes you inside their deep and abiding love in this beautifully and soulfully written memoir.”
— Dorothea Benton Frank, New York Times bestselling author
The Beaufort community suffered a profound loss when beloved and legendary Lowcountry author Pat Conroy died in early March 2016. Just a few months earlier in late October, The Pat Conroy at 70 Festival, both a literary festival and celebration of Pat’s seventieth birthday, honored his life’s work of storytelling through writing, in his adopted hometown of Beaufort. At the time of the festival, no one was aware, not even Pat, that he was ill.
Pat’s wife, award-winning New York Times bestselling author Cassandra King Conroy, has written a new memoir, Tell Me A Story: My Life With Pat Conroy (William Morrow, October 2019), debuting in Beaufort this October. In it, Cassandra “…looks back at her love affair with a natural-born storyteller whose lust for life was fueled by a passion for literature, food, and the Carolina Lowcountry that was his home,” says a press release announcing her new book.
“I knew that the title of the book had to be Tell Me A Story,” Cassandra shared with me. In her introduction to A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections On A Writing Life (a volume of interviews, magazine articles, speeches, and letters from Pat Conroy’s long literary career), which was published in 2016 after his death, Cassandra writes:
Story was the way Pat connected with his readers. They couldn’t seem to get enough of his stories, nor could he get enough of theirs. His readers wrote him long, heartrending letters about how they related to his writings, and the various ways his life story paralleled and validated theirs. He read them all, and would have answered each letter had he been able to do so…
In her new memoir, Tell Me A Story, Cassandra recounts her life with Pat Conroy beginning in 1995, when they met by chance at a literary conference reception in Birmingham, Alabama. She describes their long-distance friendship blossoming over the next two years through sporadic phone calls, until they met in person once again for a dinner in Atlanta. That’s when they first shared personal stories about their former lives and spouses and their romance began to unfold. “As she reflects on their relationship and the eighteen years they spent together, cut short by Pat’s passing at seventy, Cassandra reveals how the marshlands of the South Carolina Lowcountry ultimately cast their spell on her, too, and how she came to understand the convivial, generous, funny, and wounded flesh-and-blood man beneath the legend, her husband, the original Prince of Tides,” explains the press release for her new book.
In our interview by phone while Cassandra attended a recent Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) conference in Spartanburg, SC, she shared why she wrote Tell Me A Story: My Life With Pat Conroy. “I didn’t start out to write a memoir or a tribute to Pat,” Cassandra explained. “I had been working on writing a cookbook with stories and recipes that focused on Pat and me cooking together for family dinners and celebrations. Pat and I always fixed meals and sat down together to eat, it was an important tradition and ritual that brought us together and formed a bond. I had written many stories about my memories of my time with Pat, as well as about the two of us cooking together. My editor wanted to hear more of the stories about Pat and me. When she received the manuscript of my memoir about my life with Pat, she told me to go back and put more about myself in it. Because I’m such a private person that was difficult for me, but reliving all of the memories of our life together through writing about them was wonderful.”
She said that it has taken about a year for Tell Me A Story to get to the point of publication and after her book’s launch in Beaufort at the end of October, she’ll be busy with a book tour throughout the Southeast until early December. Cassandra added, “I’m getting reviews from people who’ve read the advanced copy of the book, who are saying I’ve written a love story to my husband. If my memoir serves to let people know what a big heart and generous spirit Pat had and what a fantastic person he was, that’s wonderful.”
When asked if she is working on other books, Cassandra said that she started working on one before Pat died. “I call it my ‘farm’ book and it’s forming. I’ve written about five chapters. It’s a fictional book about someone who, like me, was raised on a farm, but who rejected that life until mid-life. Pat told me this was ‘my story’, being raised on a farm that has been in the family for generations and being passionate about farming, but seeing the disappearance of family farms in America.”
Cassandra shared a bittersweet memory with me about her husband’s generous and caring spirit, saying, “Pat told me in his last few days that I had to get back to my writing because that would help me after he was gone.”
Cassandra King Conroy is an award-winning author of five novels, a book of nonfiction, numerous short stories, magazine articles, and essays. In addition to appearing on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists, her books have earned many accolades. Before writing full time, she taught college-level English and creative writing.
Cassandra’s new memoir Tell Me A Story: My Life With Pat Conroy will launch in Beaufort on October 29 at the home of Dr. Lucius and Daryll Lafitte. Limited tickets for this cocktail party from 5:30 – 6:30 PM, which include a signed copy of the book, will be available through the USC Beaufort Center for the Arts website: www.uscbcenterforthearts.com. Cassandra will speak at a free event open to the public at 7:00 PM titled, “Cassandra in Conversation,” hosted by the USC Beaufort Center for the Arts on the USCB campus. On December 12, Cassandra will speak at the USC Beaufort Lunch With Authors Series at the Country Club of Hilton Head at noon. Tickets will be available on the USCB Center for the Arts website.
