Bestselling author Cassandra King Conroy considers her life and the man she shared it with, paying tribute to her husband, Pat Conroy, the legendary figure of modern Southern literature.

Cassandra King was leading a quiet life as a professor, divorced “Sunday wife” of a preacher, and debut novelist when she met Pat Conroy.

Their friendship bloomed into a tentative, long-distance relationship. Pat and Cassandra ultimately married, partly because Pat hated the commute from coastal South Carolina to her native Alabama. It was a union that would last eighteen years, until the beloved literary icon’s death from pancreatic cancer in 2016.

In this poignant, intimate memoir, the woman he called King Ray 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. 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.
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“You’ll read this touching memoir through tears of both laughter and sorrow. By turns lyrical and down-home, Cassandra King Conroy writes straight from the heart about the agony of loss, even while illuminating the joy of loving and being loved – timelessly.”–Sandra Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Outfox and Tailspin.

“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

“Tell Me A Story is breathtakingly tender, heartbreakingly true…The best memoir I’ve read.”–Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of The Beach House Reunion

“…through this wonderful memoir, Cassandra King Conroy has enriched our sense of [Pat Conroy] by sharing their life together. Humorous as well as deeply moving, Tell Me a Story is a triumph.”–Ron Rash, New York Times bestselling author of Serena

“Penned with a profound sense of love, keen sense of humor, and great, great regret, Cassandra King [Conroy] allows us inside the most personal things, a love, with a man who truly was larger than life.”–Rick Bragg, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of All Over But the Shoutin’

“With her downhome honesty, wry humor and steel-magnolia strength, writer Cassandra King opens the book on her own life, including her youth as a failed southern belle, her years as a Sunday Wife, and finally, her courtship and marriage to southern icon Pat Conroy. Conroy wrote often of his wife, with humor and exaggeration. King Conroy tells the rest of the story, right up till his death in his beloved Lowcountry, on the banks of Battery Creek. A portrait of the South emerges, and the tenacity of art, and marriage, and the redemptive power of love.” — Janis Owens, author of American Ghost