The Friends of the Library at Pfeiffer University will meet, via Zoom, on the first Monday of each month.
Cassandra King Conroy’s memoir, “Tell me a story: my life with Pat Conroy”, will be the club’s first featured book. The discussion will start at 19h. February 1st. Future books will be announced at the end of each meeting. There is no cost to participate, but registration is required.
The book club “is planning to continue practically every month, allowing alumni to participate, regardless of where they live,” said Tonya Judge, director of alumni and community involvement at Pfeiffer. “Hopefully, by the end of the year, your bookshelf will be filled with new choices from well-known and emerging authors that will improve your life in some way. We ask that you share the news about the formation of the book club with friends so that they can enjoy the new favorite reading of each month together. “
As a bonus, Cassandra King Conroy will present “Tell Me a Story” at 11am on April 22, during a free Zoom presentation at the annual spring lunch of the Friends of the Library at Pfeiffer University. (Note: this will replace Conroy’s previously scheduled involvement in Pfeiffer, which was canceled last spring because of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Just before Pat Conroy, the famous author of bestsellers like “The Great Santini” and “The Prince of the Tides”, died in 2016 of pancreatic cancer, his wife promised him that he would write again after he left. Cassandra King Conroy – award-winning author of essays, articles and novels like “Making Waves”, “The Sunday Wife” and “Queen of Broken Hearts” – did just that. She also continued to work on a cookbook that combined recipes with upbeat stories that reflected the Conroys’ love of food, cooking and entertainment for guests at her South Carolina home.
This project would have a limited scope, a therapeutic way for Cassandra to overcome the pain of losing Pat, whom she married in 1998, after a three-year courtship. Instead, as work on the cookbook progressed, the “whole story” about her life with Pat “kept showing up,” she said. “I felt compelled to tell.”
The cookbook gave way to a memoir: “Tell me a story: my life with Pat Conroy” (William Morrow, 2019).
“I received a lot of feedback from this book, as you can imagine,” said Cassandra. “Almost everyone said that they thought they knew Pat by reading his works. They saw from my account of the time I spent with him that he was very similar to what you would think would be in his books. “
One of Pat’s longtime admirers sent Cassandra an email saying that she hesitated to read “Tell me a story”, fearing that it wouldn’t appear in the memoirs as she imagined it. She read the memoir anyway – and was happy to find a funny, generous and grand personality.
A male reader of “Tell Me a Story” thought the book might sound mushy. Instead, “he thought he was extremely balanced, which showed that he was as complex and complicated as you might expect,” said Cassandra. “Pat was deeply hurt by the trauma of his childhood and many later experiences in life as well.”
Cassandra met Pat in 1995 at a party for a writers conference in Birmingham, Alabama. At the time, they were at radically different points in their careers. Pat had already reached the height of the writing profession; Cassandra was about to make her debut as a novelist.
A relationship would flourish anyway. This “happened because we discovered that we were in the same place, emotionally and in our life experiences,” said Cassandra. Both in their 50s, both raised children and were overcoming failed marriages.
Pat “was in a very bad situation,” said Cassandra. “He was very much in demand, giving lectures and going from one event to the next. He was exhausted emotionally and physically. Unconsciously, I think, he was looking for a safe haven and I felt that he found it in me and in our relationship. “
In time, Cassandra would also find a safe haven in Pat – which, she said, “sounds very contradictory because he has had two failed marriages and many failed relationships. It wasn’t exactly security or shelter material or anything. ”Cassandra’s reluctance to get involved with Pat started to weaken as she got to know him better. This meant looking under the surface of a man who appeared to be “this dynamo so intense”.
As readers of “Tell Me a Story” will learn, “there was a sweet and kind person who was under that surface, under that persona,” she said.
Visit community.pfeiffer.edu/folspring2021 to register for the free event with Cassandra King Conroy.
To register for Friends of the Library Book Club meetings, visit https://community.pfeiffer.edu/fol-bc or contact Tonya Judge at 704-463-3038 or [email protected], subject : book club.