Up close and personal with Pat Conroy

Katherine Clark adds a unique and valuable piece to the portrait of one of the best-loved contemporary writers in the English language with My Exaggerated Life. In a televised interview, Clark defined this work (it is an oral biography, a polished transcript of over 200 hours of one-on-one conversations between Pat Conroy, who died in 2016, and Clark) as “a book that no one has written.” As opposed to a third-party work of scholarship or a carefully honed autobiography, My Exaggerated Life gives readers the opportunity to enter Conroy’s home as a guest and to hear his spoken story in written word. The words are Conroy’s; the pen is Clark’s.

My Exaggerated Life: Pat Conroyby Pat Controy, Katherine Clark

University of South Carolina Press. 352p $29.99

The book’s five chapters begin and end as Conroy moves between South Carolina, Georgia, Italy and California. Each holds a rich collection of stories of the characters, troubles and triumphs that he encountered in each place. In her introduction, Clark calls this book a vehicle for “the voice, the character, personality, and the humanity of Pat Conroy and the amber of his own spoken words.”

With pen in hand, Pat Conroy is lyrical, planned and polished; over the phone, he is matter-of-fact, unscripted and colorfully irreverent.

Conroy wrote a number of memoirs, and a scholarly biography has also recently been released to the public. But Clark’s work gives us something that others do not—indeed, cannot—as the spoken voice of Pat Conroy is so different from the written. With pen in hand, Conroy is lyrical, planned and polished; over the phone, he is matter-of-fact, unscripted and colorfully irreverent. In both places readers will find the same large-heartedness, depth, wisdom, resilience and humor that has drawn them to Conroy for decades.

Throughout the book, Clark honors her commitment not to come between reader and subject. Aside from the introduction and postscript, her voice breaks the narrative on one brief and appropriate occasion. Her aim is to let the hero bare his soul instead of burnishing his image, as “the sharing of his inner self and its stark truths is his finest act of heroism.” With My Exaggerated Life, Conroy and Clark succeed in letting his soul be known. This book is a valuable asset for anyone curious to know the hero they already love in his fiction.