When Conroy Met King

We tell stories to remember. And when the author Pat Conroy died in March 2016 of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Cassandra King Conroy, knew there was only one way to channel her grief. “I would go back to writing,” she says. “That would be what I would have to do to go on with my life, without him.”

Cassandra, a Lower Alabama native, had met Pat twenty-one years earlier, and after their friendship blossomed into a long-distance courtship between her home state and Pat’s cottage on Fripp Island, South Carolina, the two married in 1998. The couple eventually made their home along a creek in Beaufort, where Cassandra—the best-selling author of such novels as The Sunday Wife and The Same Sweet Girls—still lives, writes, and serves as the honorary chair of the Pat Conroy Literary Center, which she cofounded.

There, in the writing room Pat insisted she have, Cassandra penned Tell Me a Story: My Life with Pat Conroy, a remembrance that spans from the moment they met to the first time she visited Pat’s grave on St. Helena Island. The memoir, which comes out in October and is excerpted below, offers not just an intimate account of what it was like to live with the larger-than-life Pat—whose name became synonymous with the Lowcountry thanks to such beloved books as The Great Santini and an unvarnished look at marriage, particularly at the heartache and complications that come with blending families.