For a brief stretch of time in the Lowcountry, being a journalist here came with one particularly great perk: You might actually get Pat Conroy on the phone. My chance came in the summer of 2010, when, lo, the titan of adjectives himself picked up.
Conroy—author of The Boo, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, My Losing Season, and The Great Santini—had just published his tenth book, My Reading Life, and I, then a plucky freelancer for the Charleston City Paper, had been handed the rather intimidating assignment of talking to Conroy about books.
He was exactly as you’d hope: gregarious, gloriously verbose, and almost comically polite. What kills me now is that I lost the recording. This was the early twenty-teens, after all, before I owned an iPhone and could casually tap Voice Memos and preserve Conroy in the cloud forever. Instead, his voice lived on a tiny digital dictaphone that has long since disappeared into whatever technological graveyard also holds my original Nokia chargers and iPod cords. Fortunately, other writers who encountered Conroy held on better to their receipts and memories.
One of those is author and travel journalist Lynn Seldon. In his new book, Pat Conroy’s Lowcountry, Seldon recounts a chance encounter that blossomed into a friendship with Conroy and shares the stretch of the South Carolina coast that the venerable author adored—and mined for material—for much of his life.
We spoke with Seldon about the book, out today, and his time with Conroy in his beloved Beaufort, Bluffton, and beyond.
So how did you actually meet Pat Conroy?
I was in Charleston for what would become one of his more legendary signings. This one was at Blue Bicycle Books. People were lined up well in advance down the street, I’ve heard for eight hours. A friend in tourism called me and said, “I know you’re a big fan of Pat’s. You went to VMI and he went to the Citadel, and I think he has some time tomorrow morning to meet you at the hotel.” I called him and actually spoke to Pat’s wife, Cassandra King. I convinced her to let me take Pat to lunch instead. We went to Slightly North of Broad and had this incredible lunch and we hit it off.
You just instantly became friends?
He had this way of taking people under his very big wing.
During that lunch, he said, “I looked you up and I had this thought that no one has ever written a coming-of-age novel about VMI like I did for Citadel with the Lords of Discipline.” I said, “Well Pat, you know, you wrote that book and then they didn’t invite you back for like twenty-five years.”
We went back to the hotel. We talked some more about the idea, and he even sort of framed out how it could work and be very different from the lores of this book. And then I honestly didn’t think anything more about it, but two nights later, about 10:30 p.m., the phone rang. It’s Pat and he’s like, “Seldon, how’s the novel going?”
That’s amazing.
He had this way of just helping writers out. Eventually my wife, Cele, and I interviewed him for a cover story for Writer’s Digest. We went down to his home on Fripp Island to do that and then I kept coming back down when he moved to Beaufort and started hosting these writers’ luncheons. I’d drive three hours down from Oak Island, North Carolina, stay for lunch, then spend the night at Pat’s house before driving home the next day.
A lot of times after, we would drive around Beaufort. He took me to his father’s grave site and where they filmed Prince of Tides and where Barbra Streisand lived while she filmed the film. I thought at the time that I was like some special, lucky guy. But then, after his funeral, the book Prince of Scribes came out with sixty-seven essays from different people who knew and loved Pat, and I discovered we were all recipients of these late-night phone calls, and this encouragement.
What a gift!
I just wish there had been more years. That’s been very much the bittersweet part about writing this book.
That’s something I was thinking about: There are so many people who loved Pat Conroy and his writing and are, like me, completists of the Conroy canon, but there are also plenty who might pick this up just to learn more about the Lowcountry. So who is this book for?
I wrote this for you, but I also wrote it for people interested in visiting places that were in Pat’s books or that were special to him, whether it’s having shrimp from Gay Fish Company on St. Helena Island or eating at the Shrimp Shack in Beaufort.
Does one particular place Pat introduced you to stand out?
It’s hard to say because Pat introduced me to so many things, but the most significant was Daufuskie Island. I had been there many times; I even went on a tour with Sallie Ann Robinson. [Editor’s note: Robinson is a sixth-generation Daufuskie Island native and Gullah chef who was a sixth-grade student of Conroy’s in the late 1960s, a period that inspired the author to write The Water Is Wide.] It was fascinating to realize that you can still go to those exact places today—to the schoolhouse where he taught, to the schoolyard where they played football. That’s the beauty of Daufuskie: So much of that history is still tangible. You can stay on the island, grab coffee at this great little coffee shop, and even see women carrying on the tradition of indigo dyeing.
I’ve always wanted to go.
You should.
I sort of think of St. Helena the same way. When you go to the Penn Center, you can still picture Pat being there when Martin Luther King, Jr. was there. I mean, the buildings are the same, the grounds are the same. And then, obviously, to have Pat’s grave site just down the road from Penn Center is pretty amazing.
Wow.
And then there’s the Citadel. I always had an appreciation for Citadel sports having attended VMI, but going back, I got to see where Pat played basketball. You can still see where he played in the Armory [now known as McAlister Field House].
The place that inspired so much of his work, from Lords of Discipline to My Losing Season.
And Ed Conroy, the Citadel’s basketball coach, is Pat’s first cousin. So that’s what this is, a travel book about Pat’s world.
The book launch for Pat Conroy’s Lowcountry will be held at The Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, South Carolina, on October 1, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm. It is free and open to the public.
Kinsey Gidick is a freelance writer based in Central Virginia. She previously served as editor in chief of Charleston City Paper in Charleston, South Carolina, and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, BBC, Atlas Obscura, and Anthony Bourdain’s Explore Parts Unknown, among others. When not writing, she spends her time traveling with her son and husband. Read her work at kinseygidick.com.
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