My Exaggerated Life

March 15, 2018

Clark, coauthor of two oral biographies (Motherwit, with Onnie Lee Logan, and Milking the Moon, with Eugene Walter) got to know novelist Pat Conroy through his admiration for her biography of artist Walter. Their literary friendship grew deeper, and together they worked on this book via phone calls--some recorded, some not--toward the end of Conroy's life. During the conversations, which Clark calls "the great good fortune of my life," Conroy offered insights into how his life shaped his fiction, how humor saved his life on more than one occasion, and the ways in which his public personae was very different from the man himself. In his youth, Conroy thought his life would never amount to anything; even with the commercial success of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, he still saw himself as "a nobody." Clark, through her interviews with Conroy as well as his family and friends, offers a broader perspective on the author's storytelling abilities, sense of humor, and self-image. VERDICT Conroy's novels and memoirs were (and are) much beloved in many literary circles; Clark's biography offers insight into his writing and thinking process and should be pleasing to his fans.--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2018
In which the beloved American novelist Conroy (1945-2016) speaks from beyond the grave, sometimes in the saltiest of language.For close to 200 hours, biographer and novelist Clark (The Headmaster's Darlings, 2015, etc.) turned on the tape recorder and let it roll in the presence of the loquacious Conroy, who obliged, providing a wealth of observations, anecdotes, shaggy dog stories, and complaints. The last are not many, but like many writers, Conroy keeps a running score of injuries, insults, and bad press. Though he professes not to read his reviews, we all know better than that; in any event, he tells a pleasing tale of running into Gail Godwin, who "gave me a horrible review for The Prince of Tides in the New York Times," and laughing off the encounter as a well-earned scar, to which he adds that he's not one of those to be scared off by the opinions of others, even if other voices have been stilled by timidity. The passages on military school and growing up in the service are especially revelatory. In one of the wisest of his remarks, Conroy ventures that "much of what we do in life is repair work on our childhood." Certainly, that was the case in his breakthrough novel The Great Santini and, to a lesser extent, in books such as The Lords of Discipline, the latter of which, he recounts, caused Gore Vidal to remark that it "could have been a good book if only I'd known that all those guys were gay." Conroy is unguarded and refreshingly open on many matters of the flesh, as when he remarks that going to Catholic school "fucked up everything connected with my dick and my brain."The occasional outburst of adult themes notwithstanding, this makes good reading not just for Conroy's fans, but also teenagers seeking a literary path out of the confusion as well as grown-ups reckoning with their own lives.

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