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Episode 175: Cassandra King Conroy — Mid-life Resurgence and Her Time with Pat Conroy in ‘Tell Me a Story’
141 Plays5 years ago
"Writing is not a competitive sport," says Cassandra King Conroy, author of Tell Me a Story, her memoir of her time with Pat Conroy.
This show is made possible by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing.
Follow the show on Twitter @CNFPod.
I hope you dig it.
Party on, CNFers!
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Transcript
Cassandra's Memoir: Starting with the Ending
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is when I start a book, I know how it's going to end. Of course, with this memoir that was given, but so I worked toward that ending.
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Speaker
That's today's guest, Cassandra King Conroy, author of the memoir, Tell Me A Story, My Life With Pat Conroy.
Sponsorship and Opportunities
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Speaker
But first, CNF, greatest podcast in the world, is sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in creative non-fiction.
00:00:33
Speaker
Recent graduate Christine Brooks recalls her experience with Bay Paths MFA faculty as being quote, filled with positive reinforcement and commitment. They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions big and small, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere, end quote.
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Speaker
Don't just take her word for it, man. Apply now at baypat.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 24th. 24th? 21st? Yeah. Okay.
Introduction to Cassandra King Conroy
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Speaker
Well then, hey CNFers. You know, to start off the month, it is NaNoWriMo for some people. I would say it's NaNoWriRiv.
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Don't unpack that at all, we're just finding creative ways to work in the middle.
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Hey, CNFers. Happy November. This is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Glad you're here. Cassandra King Conroy is here to talk about her work. Tell me a story. My life with Pat Conroy.
Reflections on Alex Paley
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Speaker
We'll get to that soon. You eat all that candy yet? You dig into all that chocolate and peanut butter? And did you begin to question what the hell they put in that KitKat chocolate to make it taste so damn good?
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Speaker
you wonder you ever wonder that I'm not supposed to eat that stuff for a number of reasons there's a great blog post by Seth Godin about not eating cheap chocolate what's it called said don't buy cheap chocolate so in any case it's worth the read it might be in the monthly newsletter that went out today
00:02:29
Speaker
Why aren't you signed up for it, man? How many times do I have to tell you? Once a month, no spam can't beat it, right? Also, this only grows this enterprise, this podcast, this community. It only grows on the backs of your support. Share with a friend if you think this is worth sharing and consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to have it.
00:02:48
Speaker
Thanks for all you do, and I mean that. And I gotta say something here. My friend Alex Paley from my time in upstate New York, my time up there, and my time working with him at Fleet Feet in Albany, he died this past weekend from brain cancer. He was 33 years old, I think, maybe 34. It doesn't matter how old he is because that is way too freaking young to die, certainly.
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in that way. And here's the thing about Alex. He was one of those people who he loved to be around. He was that guy. He was in medical school. He would have been the kind of doctor that would make you feel better just by shaking his hand. He was always smiling, always laughing, and he dies.
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And where's the justice? It tears me apart just thinking about it. He was a competitive runner, like he could win races. He was that good and he was just, like I said, just one of those people that he loved to be around. I mean he drove me nuts a lot of the time because he primarily sat in the back of the store watching daily show clips and eating pasta and laughing his ass off.
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He was argumentative, sometimes to the point of really annoying, but he was always a pleasure to be around. He unironically gave my wife and me Pictionary for my birthday one year. We never took it out of the shrink wrap, but we thought it was the most charming little gift ever. He helped us move from Saratoga Springs to neighboring Ballston Lake. When I was starting my baseball memoir, we joked around calling it base dad ball.
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So we just had a great relationship when we were around each other. When my first book came out, his parents came by one of my several pitifully attended book signings and bought a copy for Alex for me to sign. And I asked Alex what he thought about it.
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and he couldn't contain how much he didn't like it. As he laughed and bumbled his way through, saying things like, it was good. No, really, it was good.
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So this past Saturday, I was telling my wife as we sat in to watch Great British Baking Show, settled in to watch it, that I said that Alex would likely pass in the next week and there was a message I had been meaning to send to him via their Caring Bridge
Cassandra's Writing Journey
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Journal. His sister was keeping a log and keeping everyone updated on his progress over the last two years or so.
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She said, Melanie said, my wife, she said, you know, you better send it because you could pass away tonight. So I wrote a quick message saying how much I was thinking about him, how much we loved the Pictionary even though we never opened it. And I was still working on base dad ball and I sent it off. I don't know if he saw it or heard it, but he died about four hours later, a little after 3 a.m. Sunday morning Eastern. He donated that brain to science.
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Speaker
I know that's a bummer to hear, but I felt it was worth sharing. Alex, I hope you're running without any soreness in your Achilles tendon somewhere, eating spaghetti and laughing your ass off to Daily Show or Colbert Report. All the things that I remember you doing in the back of the office at Fleet Feet Albany. We'll try and make do without you down here, man.
00:06:26
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Well, how do you transition off of that? Well, Cassandra King Conroy is here to talk about her writing life and her midlife marriage to the bigger than life writer Pat Conroy. The name of the book is Tell Me a Story. You can find out more about Cassandra at CassandraKingConroy.com. And here's my conversation. Thank you very much for listening. I think Alex would approve of this riff.
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What did a, uh, you know, in your twenties, thirties and maybe into your forties, you know, what did a successful writer look like to you? And how did your ambitions measure, uh, sort of slot alongside that? Well, I'm sort of embarrassed to say that, that I didn't really have the ambitions. I could, I sort of let go of those. I'm talking a lot about women of mine generation.
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And so when I got married and started a family, it was kind of like I gave up my dreams to be a writer for that and put it all aside. Well, I said I was putting it aside, but I never did. I kept writing in secret, but I didn't have any encouragement in that.
00:07:58
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in my form of marriage. I remember one time that I sent a piece in, Jesse Hill Ford was doing a, I can't remember, it was a week or a couple of week long workshop. I was living in Birmingham at the time in college in Birmingham. And you sent, you had to be accepted, you know, it was only taking so many students. And I sent a story in,
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And I was accepted into it. And goodness, I was maybe in my 30, you know, 30, early thirties then had small kids. And I was so excited. I couldn't wait for my ex to get in so I could.
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Well, now my ex, you know, to get in so I could tell him, oh my God, I've been accepting this. He said, you can't do that. I mean, we can't afford a babysitter and I'm not going to be able to watch kids for you to, to give this. So I, I gave up my slot to someone else.
00:09:01
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Yeah, it pains me now to say these things, but... Yeah. Oh, and there's a point in your most recent book that I had marked, too, where you said, despite my blathering in class, it changed me to admit that I'd never had the self-respect to make demands in order to nurture my own career.
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And that's kind of exactly what you're saying now. It's just like at that point, it didn't seem like something you could take on. And granted, it was part of the times. But thankfully, you were able to kind of crack out of it and then really sort of forge your own path. Yeah. And what I beat up on myself about it, but I look back, looking back,
00:09:51
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I was, I was writing, I was writing all the time. I may have been just journaling or, or, you know, just, uh, sending things to small journals and stuff, academic journals, literary journals,
Transition to Memoir and Creative Non-Fiction
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things like this. But at least I was, I was keeping, I was nourishing.
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that part of myself in my own way at that time. I was both denying it and nourishing it too in a way.
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And with the journaling you might have been doing and also writing these stories, how are you building that into your daily routine? And that might have even extend to how you go about the work today. What are those kind of routines for you? Well, for one thing, I have kind of gotten over this, but Pat was amazed when we first got married that
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that I could be, we could be waiting for a plane or something and I, you know, be in an airport lobby and I could be working on, you know, a book, a chapter or something like that, because I realized I had had to snatch whatever time I had. And when my kids were young and they were
00:11:13
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There were, you know, growing up, all it was nap time or school time or in between, you know, things that, that I did. And then when I was older and teaching at a college, it would be in between classes. I just learned to take whatever time that I could. So as, as a consequence, I, I could, I did not need all the, you know, have to get in my own little,
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mood and off to myself and burn candles and, you know, all this sort of stuff. I would
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I was glad to get whatever, whatever time I could. With respect to, you know, this was, it's a, you've been, you know, primarily a novelist and of course, tell me a story is a memoir of your time with Pat Conroy. And what made you want to take on, take on the memoir at this point? Well, you know, Brendan, it was, it was, I was sort of leading up to it without realizing because about
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Actually, this was before I was even with Pat. I had written, I had not written, you know, nonfiction. I did my first book, which started out being a collection of short stories. I ended up making it into just a novella sort of
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sort of thing. And so I loved it. I loved doing the novels and got totally and gave up short stories altogether. But I had this scene in my first book, and it was the whole thing was this family dinner. And it was all brought with with, you know, usual family drama and all this. But but it, it also
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brought out a lot of these Southern dishes that Southerners in particular would be, I think, identify with. So I had an editor from Southern Living Magazine got in touch with me and said, we would love for you to do an article. I read
Challenges of Writing After Loss
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your book and that was my favorite part of it. And you have a way of writing about
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you know food so so I started I started I did one article magazine article and then later I would do I would do more and and so I had I discovered when I did a year-long stint for a coastal living magazine and I wrote an essay on the back page and it it was thematic
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And it was something about coast living on the coast or not necessarily living on the coast because I wrote one or two about visit to main coast and another visit to California coast. But I loved it. I loved the structure of having
00:14:32
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uh, to rearrange the words to, to fit in, um, strictly within these, I believe, I can't remember the 500 or a thousand word, you know, essays, but, but they had to be that to fit the space. And then they were thematic as well. So it was almost like I was going back to English one-on-one writing essays.
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essays again. And so I'd done a right good bit of that and really liked it. And then I started working on cookbook and I was doing it with a friend and she has a cookbook out and tells a lot of Southern stories. She's from Florida, Alabama, all these Southern stories of the
00:15:27
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fish fries and the church suppers and the things like that. And I've written several chapters on that, but then I put that aside, Pat got sick. So one of the things I was doing after he died, and I did promise him that I would go back
00:15:50
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to my writing. He made me say that I would do that and he really felt like that would be helpful to me and it was very much so. But I went back to writing these stories about he and I entertaining together and stuff like this.
00:16:10
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And it made me see that there were so many stories of our time together that I really wanted to tell. And a lot of them didn't have anything to do with food. So I couldn't think of a way to work them into it. And then my editors, when she saw them, she said, no, this really needs to be a memoir. That's the stories you need. Those are the stories you need to tell.
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Yeah, and I think coming away from reading it, you do realize how important food and travel was to the two of you. You guys really had a great connection over good food and good regional and geographical food, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's so much more I could
00:16:54
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I did have in there took out to use for the cookbook when I eventually do that. So I've got a lot of cooking stuff, you know, cooking food related kind of things. And when you approach a story of this nature and it's, you know, still I have to imagine it was, you know, pretty, pretty raw because Pat passed away and
00:17:18
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March 2016 and you know this book comes out just a little over three years later so you were you know writing this probably in the throes of grief so I how challenging was it to approach this book given how raw that experience was? It was a lot worse than I thought it would be. I mean I really thought a friend of ours started writing his own book about his friendship with Pat and he kept telling me
00:17:47
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you've got to do this. It's so therapeutic. I'm just really, you know, kind of enjoying almost reliving these, you know, fun times together and stuff like that. And then when I got into mine, I found that reliving those times were in a lot of ways more painful than, than talking about his, his illness and death. You know, it's just,
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Of course, because that's what you miss most. That's where the grief comes from, because when someone was very sick, like he was at the end, even though it was very sudden, the death is a release and you don't want them to suffer. But then when you start thinking about the good times,
00:18:43
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the love affair and all this stuff. And that's where the painful part really came in, though I'm certainly not saying by any means it wasn't difficult to retell and relive through telling.
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You know, the part about his sickness and all, it certainly was. Yeah, so how did you manage to, you know, generate this manuscript in your rough early drafts, you know, just given how sensitive and probably how, you know, fresh those, you know, those cuts still felt? How did you work through that?
Crafting a Memoir: Process and Structure
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Just exactly.
00:19:24
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The only way out is through and and I just I would I would stop at times. There were even a few times where I said, OK, this is too soon. I can't do it. So maybe I should, you know, rethink this, go back, do the little light stories in the cookbook. Or there was another novel that that I've been wanting to write for a while, and I've worked some on that. That's what I call my farm book, that if you read the
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since you've read the memoir, you'll know Pat told me he wanted me to get back to the farm book. It's cause I was, I had worked some on, on Pat at a time when, when I was so sick of writing recipes, trying to get those in the format. Um, so, so I would think, I can't do this. You know, this is ridiculous. Why, why did I think I could? Yeah. So, but, but I
00:20:24
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You know, I did, I just, and it wasn't, you know, the good thing about writing nonfiction or memoir that I've discovered is that you don't have to make up something, you know, you don't have to say, okay, well, how am I going to get my character out of this now? Oops, I've got them in the situation. And this needs to happen for that to happen and so forth. You're telling a story.
00:20:54
Speaker
You're telling it as as as it happened. And it's so it makes you just go there and you finish your story. You just plunge, you know, like plunging into a pool or something. Just just go to you. You feel your hands on the other side of the pool.
00:21:13
Speaker
And when you find yourself in the middle of drafts, whether that's a novel or this memoir, you know, it's when you're, you know, the sort of honeymoon period of like, oh, this is going to be a great idea. This is something I really want to pursue. You know, when that kind of wears off and you're right in the middle and you're pretty far away from the end, too, what is the nature of how you approach the ugly middle of drafts when you want it?
00:21:38
Speaker
When you just want to abandon, go to something new, but you got a soldier on. You got to do it. You got yourself in there now. Yeah. Well, I think what I do, it helps that the way I write, I get these ideas and they're churning like all writers, you know, they're churning around in my head and
00:22:05
Speaker
I'm not one of these writers. I could never do this. If I wrote an outline for what I was going to write first, I would never write it. The only book I really, they asked for synopsis and they said like a three page synopsis of a third novel I wrote so I could get for my contract for my third novel. I wrote this synopsis.
00:22:31
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I had no idea what I was going to do with this book. So I just made something up left and right. I knew that that would totally, I wouldn't be able to do what I wrote because that would dissipate all the creative energy I needed to, you know, to, to make up this story kind of as a go. But what, but what I do is when I start a book, I know how it's going to end.
00:23:01
Speaker
Of course, with this memoir that was given. So I worked toward that ending. I don't, by any means, know all the twists and turns it's going to take to get there. But without having written anything out, not outlining or anything like that, but just in my mind as these ideas begin to form, I think I'm just one of these that have to know where it's going.
00:23:31
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And, um, you know, I've heard other, other writers, uh, say, and I've heard, I mean, Pat said that several times, this really isn't what I intended to do with this, but once I got into it and I can see that happening, that's just, that's not the way I, you know, that's just not my, my stuff, my creative process or whatever you want to call it. I just, uh, I just have, I know where I'm going with it.
00:23:57
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Yeah, I think once you, I need a lighthouse to aim at. And, you know, it's just like, even if maybe right at the very start, I'm not 100% sure where it is, but like the sooner I can come up with the ending, the better I feel, because then you can start building things that kind of inform it and feed it and logically approach that lighthouse in the distance.
Admiration for Pat Conroy's Storytelling
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And it does feel like you have like this, there is this goal. I don't know how long it's going to take to get there, but I do know what's out there.
00:24:25
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And then what kind of, you know, you're rowing toward that lighthouse and what kind of current's going to come and sweep you up or whatever. But that's where you go in with it. Yeah, that's a good one. I like that. So before you had met Pat, you of course were familiar with his work as a writer. And I wonder like what you took away early and then as you knew him more, what you took away, you know, later.
00:24:55
Speaker
Oh, well, I think when I when I first read him, it's sort of the. The reason that I had to name the book what what I caught the title was never. In question to me, tell me a story because I was I was really taken with his. The way you could tell a story, you know, it just at all these these
00:25:24
Speaker
twists and turns his stories would take and he would keep you turning pages and in a most enjoyable way, even if it was not particularly an enjoyable story, you were into it, you were caught in. And like with the Lords of Discipline, for example,
00:25:46
Speaker
I thought that was beautifully crafted. He had the mystery, the whole unveiling of his secret society and all the little things that went on with that. So I had always thought, though I tried to pretend otherwise at points in my education when I was coming along,
00:26:17
Speaker
And the people would admire writers that I didn't particularly admire because nothing happened in their books. I like books with a story. I realize that even though I could read
00:26:41
Speaker
books and just appreciate them for the beauty of the language and the characters and so forth are really preferred books that had a good story behind it. So that was, I think, I know that that was what I liked so much about past writing when I first
00:27:04
Speaker
read but but also very much appreciated his his his prose and his prose style especially and I still think he he's he's a master one of the best I've ever read imagery uh and you the use of imagery and fiction and and his metaphors and so forth just be so I would
00:27:31
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take some of those and used them in handouts. I mean, I had a couple of years. I had others from so many other, you know, writers.
Writing Techniques and Inspirations
00:27:41
Speaker
But I used those in handouts in my composition 101 and 102 classes. So he had, to me, he sort of had everything. Fascinating characters, you know, very complex characters.
00:27:58
Speaker
no pliches that I saw. He had a great story. A few times maybe he went a little, and he would say this, you know, get a little carried away with it. And he was always teased about the tiger, you know, and the Prince of Tides coming along to save the day right at the last minute and all this. But that was just past, I think,
00:28:28
Speaker
very, very vivid imagination. So he had this beautiful language. He just had to me, the great characters, the beautiful language, the storytelling, everything you want and what I enjoyed and look for in a book. And then of course, when I got to know him, one thing he did,
00:28:54
Speaker
that I had already done, but I think we both did this. He collected, now I just collected names. So I have a notebook of names and I have to name my characters before I can really know them. And a character has to, their names represent who they are before I really create them. And I don't know why that is, but you know, whatever it is.
00:29:20
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So Pat did that, but he did something else that that I did some of later, not to the extent that he did. He also collected words that he liked. And he had long list that that he would make of of words that would inspire him to think of a of of an image or whatever. So.
00:29:48
Speaker
I like that. It's kind of like a butterfly net, just like catching words, catching ideas that strike your fancy so you can use them for later. Yeah, yeah. So I observed his doing that. He also, he created, like me, he didn't outline or say some good Lord opposite, I guess, Nantalese, his editor would certainly say, because
00:30:15
Speaker
Now, I don't think this is true. I recently heard someone give a talk on beach music and said that it was 2,000 handwritten pages. I'm pretty sure it was something like 1,200 handwritten pages. But so much, I mean, he did so much more than needs to do. So he always had
00:30:44
Speaker
so many subplots, plots, you know, the main plot, but then all the subplots and is that he, like, like I do, had these things thought out in his head. So he wrote by hand. Yeah. So I was talking about the handwritten pages, but he, he didn't start over a lot.
00:31:10
Speaker
I mean, when he started writing, he would sit and I mean, that's what I love about writing on a computer. I used to write by hand too, but once I, boy, once I got on the computer and I could just hit that back, you know, and re rewrite something didn't sound right when I wrote it. But by the time Pat put pen to paper, he had worked it out in his mind. And I thought that that was pretty fascinating too, because
00:31:40
Speaker
It's hard to write by hand now when you're not used to it, especially, you know, even if I write a thank you note stuff now, it's so different than composing it on the computer. And, uh, so it was literally, uh, laborious. I think it's, I was about to say laborious, but I believe that's laborious for him to physically to, to write these.
00:32:06
Speaker
these things. And it took him so long. I mean, it took him years to write a book. That's why because of the actual physical writing of the book. He would live within his own mind for so much of the time. I mean, he was and he was creating these books in his mind so that once he sat down,
Balancing Writing and Life
00:32:35
Speaker
to start to write them out. He had them.
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, I love that it's kind of like this kind of ongoing process. Writers are kind of always writing, even if they're not at their computer, right? And I think a really poignant part in the book, too, is when I'm thinking it must have been in Fripp Island at the house there, where you finally had your own, to use Virginia Woolf's term, a place to call your own or a room to call your own.
00:33:06
Speaker
That was a very poignant part like how important was that for you to finally have this place? You know your own turf to call your own to get you to so you could approach your work. We you know and have your own space It was actually of major importance to me that I did I did not realize it at the time and hadn't realized how that important that would be to to anyone because Up until then I had always you know
00:33:36
Speaker
just whatever place I could grab. That was, that was my writing space. So when Pat asked me about, well, what was your writing room like you? Cause you had lived in, I had lived in so many different, you know, houses going around.
00:33:57
Speaker
My ex was sort of sent from one place to the next every four years. And I said, well, I never had one. I mean, if we had an office in the house, it would be for him. And even with him not being there in the day, it would not occur to me to go in there to work. He was determined. He said, well, you're going to have your own writing space.
00:34:26
Speaker
And it really made, it made a tremendous difference because then, and that's why I was saying earlier, I'm sort of spoiled now because I used to have to try to write it despite all the distractions. And so consequently, I was not very prolific, but once I was able to do this without the distractions, it just all came pouring out.
00:34:55
Speaker
And what's the routine by which you try to thread your writing practice in around your day? What's the discipline look like? And maybe how do you warm up to it? And so yeah, I think routines are important. So I wonder how you have cultivated your own sense of practice around this.
00:35:15
Speaker
Well, that was another thing I was going to say about writing an article. I think I left this out. I mean, we certainly have deadlines with book writing, magazine articles. You definitely have a deadline there. If you miss it, you miss, especially if you're writing some seasonal something, you miss it for a year or whatever. So I usually self-impose some deadlines on myself.
00:35:45
Speaker
Like by the end of this week, I want to have blocked off enough time from other stuff them have to do or even go out and get groceries or things like that. And that helps to say, okay, I'm going to have this chapter finished by the end of this week.
00:36:07
Speaker
That way, I can sort of, you know, divvy up my time on a daily basis of what I can do, what I can't do. Even having said that, though, when I get deeply lost in writing, and I'm kind of at a crucial point working through something in the plot,
00:36:34
Speaker
I won't stop to eat or, or, you know, a lot of times I'm, I'm working in my room and it gets dark, you know, I might, I might get up to run, get a, you know, a glass of wine, but, but it's, it's coming back to, oh goodness, I've got to go out and I've got to water the, the plants. I got to bring in the bird feeder, you know, things like this. I don't, I mean, I, I will.
00:37:01
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I will literally lose myself in what I'm doing, but that's not my preferred way to do it. I really like to set up, have some self-imposed deadlines and work toward those.
00:37:17
Speaker
And something I liked from the memoir too was when, towards the end, but it actually crops up through is how kind of excited Pat would be to read a new writer, maybe someone who didn't have as big a writer celebrity, if you will. But he would just be like, oh, this is great. And I love that celebratory nature. And I wonder, just even for you too,
00:37:45
Speaker
Yeah, how important is that for a writer to be like, to take every take someone else's win and make it your own versus being like jealous and competitive? I always tell my students, you know, riding is not a competitive sport. It's, you know, it's not. And, and I want
00:38:05
Speaker
I want other writers to write because I like to read. I don't want to read my stuff. And so it's a little hard for me to relate to, though I think it's kind of human nature. And of course, we'll read this and think, hmm, how did this book? And believe me, there have been some that I've heard about, oh, gosh, I've got to get this book.
00:38:34
Speaker
And I get it and I read it and I was like, what was all the fuss about on that one? But then on the other hand, you might just pick up a book and just at random in a bookstore or something. And you think, why is this book not, you know, a Pulitzer Prize winner or something? This is magnificent. So, you know, it's, I just, I feel like
Memoir Decisions: Honesty vs. Privacy
00:39:04
Speaker
it
00:39:04
Speaker
It's important for us to think of ourselves as sort of a tribe, you know, because we should understand each other. We have the same quirks and we have the same wants and desires and, you know, this sort of stuff. I don't think anybody really understands a writer like another writer does.
00:39:30
Speaker
And that's why I used to say I was going to set up a dating service for writers or something because I think that was, you know, that was one of my problems. And Pat said it was with his two and other relationships because it's hard to live with someone who, whose mind is always elsewhere, you know, who lives in their own little world. And they're in that little world creating all these, these,
00:40:00
Speaker
these scenarios and characters and instead of paying attention to their mate and it takes a toll and maybe that's why so many of us have had several failed relationships and things like this because it's hard. So we should understand each other maybe a little more and support each other.
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, and where I get into trouble, to your point, is through the podcast and even the journalism, I do like a part of what I do is I'm conversing and I'm listening a lot. And I listen a lot. And as a result, sometimes with my wife, I'm not sometimes often more than I'd like to admit, not the greatest listener.
00:40:55
Speaker
And it's a point of contention that it's like I can have the listener muscle so well rehearsed and really firing well for when I do my trade. But then, yeah, bringing it home, it's like I forget that's the most important person to be listening to all the time. Absolutely. And it's like, I guess, the cobbler's
00:41:22
Speaker
family has no shoes kind of thing is put all your, you know, you put all your energy into what you're doing, then you don't have the energy for the ones that need it the most, maybe. Yeah, and over the course of, you know,
00:41:44
Speaker
of writing this memoir, was there anything that kind of surprised you over the course of writing it? Things that you didn't, you might not have even remembered until you started writing, and just through the sheer process of it, you remembered just, oh, wow, we did this. I completely forgot about we did this 10 years ago, and it just kind of came up. What was that like? I did some of that, but what I'm doing more now is thinking of things that I left out.
00:42:12
Speaker
folks haven't read yet, you know, will say to me, Oh, I know you must've told that hilarious story when Pat said, such as such, and you said, such, blah, blah, and all this kind of stuff. And I think, Oh, I can't believe I forgot that one. So, so I think I've sort of done, but, but I think, you know, the really difficult thing about memoir, and I'm sure I would think that any,
00:42:40
Speaker
anyone who's done, done, one can tell you would say the same on, on this, you've probably interviewed a lot of people that have, and I haven't asked anyone, but the big thing is what do you tell them? What do you leave out? Uh, when you're, you're going over a span of, uh, you know, with Pat nine, 20, see we met 95 and he, you know, he died 21 years later. So this, this,
00:43:09
Speaker
the span of time that you could, you know, if you just wrote a chapter on each year of your life together, it would, it would, it would be, you know, volumes or whatever. So you can't do that. You have to, and what makes some things more important than others in, in your life or, or, you know,
00:43:38
Speaker
I wrote a chapter where I kind of talked about losses that we, you know, experienced some of the really good friends we'd lost. That wasn't everyone, you know. And I'm not even sure why I didn't try to have everyone in there. I mean, we lost two or three others.
00:44:02
Speaker
friends. We had very good friends who lost a child and that just affected all of us and and this sort of stuff and I didn't write about that. Um so so that was that's one of the things that that fascinated me about memoir and without having you do have sort of a chronological of course uh if so if you're writing about a marriage you
00:44:30
Speaker
order, your childhood or anything like that, you've got the chronological order that you're going in. But what you include in that and what's left out and the conscious choice or sometimes the not even conscious choice to do, it just sort of, you know, seems that this should be the next thing, even though looking back on it may not been one of the most significant things
00:45:00
Speaker
that happened in your lives together. I don't know. That to me was a really fascinating part of the process.
00:45:10
Speaker
What were some of the most difficult decisions and how you wrote about your marriage over, you know, the 20 years or so? You know, that's, you know, ultimately you had various visions that you could have or things you could have told and everything's a decision. And so I wonder what were some of those hard decisions for you?
00:45:36
Speaker
But yeah, well, and they were and, and part of that, uh, hard decisions is also about what, what you include, you know, how much did I want to say, for example, about Pat's drinking.
00:45:51
Speaker
It was a problem. He talked about it. I'm not outing him or anything like that as having had a drinking problem. But I didn't want to make that like a major focus of the book or anything because it wasn't really and it was definitely a problem. It was definitely
00:46:21
Speaker
uh, you know, a big, big factor where this helped them. And, and during the years that we were together, but it was, but on the other hand, it was, it was, it was not the whole story. It was not the story of a, there have been, uh, books, I know, you know, uh, written about substance abuse and addiction and things like that, where that's,
00:46:49
Speaker
That is the focus of books. So, you know, I had those kind of things. And then I'm a very private person. And I had not written much about myself. I'd done more so recently. I've written like three or four, maybe four or five essays.
00:47:19
Speaker
um and anthologies and one of women in faith and spiritual development and you know these sorts of of things that I had begun to talk about my depression and things like this that I've never written or talked about much before uh so so it was for me that
Exploring New Beginnings in Midlife
00:47:48
Speaker
did not come naturally. That did not come naturally. That was the struggle. That was one of the things that my editor had me come back and say, I'm not really getting here. You allude to some problems in your earlier marriage with your search for your own identity and all this.
00:48:17
Speaker
You're still being evasive about it and having to open up more than I'm comfortable doing.
00:48:28
Speaker
I think the great undercurrent of this book too is that it was kind of an ode to a second act or even a third act, a midlife act where a lot of people might resign themselves to, well, this is what my life was for 50 years. I'm just going to ride this out.
00:48:49
Speaker
But it but in so many ways like you know you guys met in your in your 50s and had a great had a great pairing at a great sort of watershed moment in your life so I think this really speaks to you know it's you can still write your story even if it feels like it's getting a lot a late a later start. Yeah that I saw that is important.
00:49:14
Speaker
talking point of the book too in that so many people have later life marriages or even take on a new career or totally just decide that they've been in a rut for a long time and they're going to
00:49:38
Speaker
to go backpacking in Europe or whatever they didn't do in their youth or start a whole just leave a family behind and start a whole new relationship, things like that. I think that this is not at all uncommon. It's something so many folks can relate to, so many readers.
00:50:07
Speaker
I have done that. With my experience, this happened at a time in my life that I had had a pretty devastating breakup. Pat had had an even more traumatic one than I had.
00:50:33
Speaker
But we were both at that point where I was a little ahead of him. My kids were older, so it didn't have the custody thing and the fear of losing a child and so forth like he did and what he eventually experienced with that. But for both of us, I think it was definitely just starting a new
00:51:03
Speaker
when I felt like, and I know he must have too, what am I doing? I've messed up every, you know, other relationships that caused myself, my family, you know, I've brought kids into the world that I've caused pain and upheaval and don't feel like I'm there for them, blah, blah, blah. Here I am trying to, you know,
00:51:29
Speaker
start over and do something, do it again? Am I crazy? I think we felt like we were kind of being swept along, but you know, it sounds so stupidly melodramatic to say this, but that's the way it felt. It felt almost like it was out of my control. I was watching a movie or something, and the script was just
00:51:57
Speaker
rolling on and I was right in the middle of it. That sounds crazy, but that's how it failed. Well, it's kind of like you were saying about being a writer, how you kind of just have to surrender to it, like it kind of chooses you. So in a sense, this relationship you had with Pat was just a confluence of things and you just had no choice but to surrender to the wins.
00:52:27
Speaker
That's what it felt like. I think that at no point did I really seriously think, you know, I'm just going to tell this guy, you know, I don't want to see him again. I don't want to get into this. I didn't really
00:52:50
Speaker
I didn't really think that, but neither did I think, boy, I'm going to grab them, jump on this. This is going to be fun, exciting, and gone.
Cassandra's Romance with Pat Conroy
00:53:01
Speaker
It just happened the way it happened, I guess. Well, there was something so charming about how it was so phone heavy early on. That just was such a high school romance, just being hours on the phone. It was really charming.
00:53:20
Speaker
I'm glad to hear you say that because it does. It's pretty embarrassing to just have it carrying on this long distance. Well, we were carrying on a long distance romance after
00:53:45
Speaker
after we had professed our love for each other and this sort. But I went back to my job. I did have that moment of caution where I wasn't going to give. And I guess I just wasn't quite ready. And maybe even subconsciously, I was thinking, well, if
00:54:12
Speaker
I go back to my life now and he goes back to his.
00:54:17
Speaker
and we drift apart than it wasn't meant to be after all. Well, I'm happy that it was meant to be for the time you guys had, because it sounds like it was a great ride, and you capture it magically in your book. So I really appreciate you for writing the book and being so forthcoming and forthright with this great chapter in your life. So thanks for writing it, and thank you for jumping on the show, Cassandra. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
00:54:50
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening. You can always follow along by subscribing to the show. You know that. Anywhere you get your podcasts. You'll be getting nice doses of Monday motivation with the micro pods as well. Head over to BrendanOmero.com. Hey, hey. Or show notes. Keep the conversation going on the social networks at CNF Pod, Instagram, and Twitter.
00:55:09
Speaker
Please if I've made something worth sharing I'd appreciate you handing this off to another cnf and say you know listen man You can if you got the time try this out. This will help you out. Hopefully it will I Think that's about it Don't have a whole lot more to say Alex will miss you man. Hope you're running and eating and playing Pictionary somewhere
00:55:33
Speaker
I don't think anybody else would get more of a kick out of my send off to this podcast than you, Alex. So remember, if you can do interview, see ya.