The Lost Prince
A Search for Pat Conroy
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“In The Lost Prince Michael Mewshaw sets down one of the most gripping stories of friendship I’ve ever read.” —Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir
Pat Conroy was America’s poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger–than–life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his self–lacerating humor.
Michael Mewshaw’s The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young—when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an international bestseller. Family snapshots beautifully illustrate that time. Shortly before his forty–ninth birthday, Conroy telephoned Mewshaw to ask a terrible favor. With great reluctance, Mewshaw did as he was asked—and never saw Pat Conroy again.
Although they never managed to reconcile their differences completely, Conroy later urged Mewshaw to write about “me and you and what happened . . . i know it would cause much pain to both of us. but here is what that story has that none of your others have.” The Lost Prince is Mewshaw’s fulfillment of a promise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At heart, this fascinating memoir from Mewshaw (Sympathy for the Devil) of his friendship with the late novelist Pat Conroy is a love story. The two men found in each other a confidant and sympathetic soul with similar fears and scars born of peripatetic military family life, strict Catholic upbringings, and abusive parents, as well as a shared love of basketball and books. They met in Rome, as part of the American expatriate community in the 1980s, forming a relationship Mewshaw describes as intense, loving, and openhearted. However, he also exposes a dark underbelly to Conroy's "hail fellow, well met" nature: his excessive drinking, his anger with one of his daughters (to whom Mewshaw was godfather) after his divorce from her mother, his tendency toward self-mythologizing, and his insecurities. Mewshaw, meanwhile, had his own personal and professional setbacks. At Mewshaw's side through it all was his friend until, during Conroy's divorce, Conroy perceived Mewshaw as taking his wife's side and broke off ties. Near the end of his life, though, the two tentatively reconnected, and Conroy urged Mewshaw to tell the story of their friendship. What could have been a maudlin, self-indulgent memory piece instead proves an honest, eminently readable look at the fraught but rewarding bond between two writers.
