The Prince of Tides joins Liars’ Club

Photo by Katya Austin on Unsplash

“What i had to do… I had to listen to my own voice… The voice was giving me good advice; this was a voice I could trust… My writer’s voice… No one had a male-dominated childhood (like I did) had ever lived upon this planet.”

Pat Conroy on NPR’s Fresh Air podcast

The podcast from a few years back is well worth the half hour. It’s cliché to say how good Terry Gross is at her craft, aside from her voice made for listening to. Hearing Conroy makes me wish we’d been drinking buddies.

One of the first notes I jotted down during the three day writers’ conference in Portland put on by the editors at Pages & Platforms, we were asked to consider who might be our ideal readers? On first hearing, it seemed an esoteric exercise. It still does, but only because I’m slow. However, all three of our Portland coaches insisted this was important, so I scratched down my note and listened, even if in the back of my mind I was still thinking huh?

Because, let’s pretend I can actually answer that question, the follow-up question becomes how do I apply the answer in some useful way? Sonofabitch! Assuming I can indeed answer it, let’s jump ahead and get to the main point.

Serendipitously I had only recently stumbled on the closest example of a novel I could point to as a similar story, The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. I say serendipitously because I was in a cab to meet up with D for her company’s Christmas party, and the cab driver was the no-talking kind, so I used my iPhone to write some notes to myself–the main one being to check out The Prince of Tides. Steven Pressfield might say that was the voice of my muse. If so, she’s one sharp lady. When the gong went off in my head, I ordered the book on Amazon.

The following are my (deeply considered) reasons for being this rash:

• The Prince of Tides is rooted in South Carolina low country–my Kill Devil story is centered on the Outer Banks and the low country of North Carolina—even Alligator River plays a role. Close enough for rock & roll. In several descriptive passages in Kill Devil, I’ve fallen back on memories from my childhood in South Carolina, focused on the intriguing mystery of black water country.
• Conroy’s protagonist and family are rooted in land sliding toward the ocean. Even Savannah, the Wingo family’s poet living in New York holds a piece of the low country inside her. My own protagonist has fallen under the spell of the tides and marshes while the Outer Banks are being chewed alive, storm after storm.
• It’s interesting to realize how much growing up in South Carolina has influenced me. I was like Savannah. I loved the country and hated the racism, poverty and ignorance. I could hardly wait to get the hell away, but here I’m still writing about it.
• Unlike Conroy, I never had an abusive parent–the reason I survived was my mother. I never had a father, which isn’t the same thing, but it was a serious handicap growing up male in the South. I can relate to Conroy.
• I’ve read of tough as nails parents (mostly men) believing they should throw a young child into the water so they learn to swim. Nurses actually let these people leave the hospital with their newborns? To my way of thinking, a serious horsewhipping might deliver some enlightenment.
• The Prince of Tides’ protagonist is a wisecracking southerner to whom Conroy gives some exceptionally droll lines. The scenes of Tom Wingo defending his “South” from New York intelligentsia and word-wrestling with Lowenstein, the NY psychiatrist are some of the most entertaining scenes.
• The Prince of Tides wraps stories inside stories. My first love of books were the ones I could bury myself in and escape the world. I may have a better idea of what I’m trying to write about after reading Conroy.
• The Prince of Tides is the exception to a popular theory that no one’s interested these days in sagas–no time for more than twittering. The Prince of Tides runs 700 pages. And currently still gets 5 star reviews on Amazon, so it hasn’t fallen off in interest. There could be hope.

Employing Shawn Coyne’s Foolscap Analysis, in which you write the entire premise on a single sheet of legal paper. I’m curious what genre The Prince of Tides might fall under, but it wouldn’t be a ‘crime thriller,’ I don’t think. No police procedural in sight. Tom Wingo is most definitely the hero struggling against overwhelming odds. Wingo doesn’t win in The Prince of Tides so much as he takes pride in his hard-learned stoicism. He does win over Savannah’s shrink, Lowenstein–who is Conroy’s proof that Wingo’s stand is valid.

I was aware of Conroy’s beef with his father before coming to the book (something the entire universe knew). I think I was listening to a Fresh Air episode years back and heard him talking about playing on the basketball team for the Citadel–that holdout bastion of Southern pride. But this whole writers’ thing about gnawing over your childhood resonates with me. Write what you know. Right.

So what’s the takeaway? That I might could be more than an audience of one.

Which, at the writer’s conference brought me to consider the back cover for Kill Devil: We did a short exercise writing blurbs. Not as easy as you might think. Mine needed work, but what I struck on during the conference was the following tag line: “The Prince of Tides joins Liars’ Club.”

I read Liars’ Club when it was first published and it’s stuck with me. Mary Karr’s book gifted me the back story for my novel’s female protagonist. I probably just stole it, but thank you, ma’am.

There’s an excerpt from Liars’ Club in a 1995 NY Times’ review that gives a flavor of Karr’s voice (particularly when you hit the landing at the end):

“Don't get me wrong. My mother's flailings at me didn't bring enough physical hurt or fear to qualify as child abuse. Her spankings were more pathetic than anything. She was way too scared of hurting anybody to hit with much of a sting.

“But some kind of serious fury must have been roiling around inside her. Sometimes, instead of spanking us, she would stand in the kitchen with her fists all white-knuckled and scream up at the light fixture that she wasn't whipping us, because she knew if she got started she'd kill us. This worked way better than any spanking could have.”

Ba dum.

From Liars’ Club by Mary Karr.

So what the hell does The Prince of Tides have to do with Liars’ Club? Voice mainly–and brutal honesty. Not so much style–Conroy’s is the vast, rolling saga and Karr’s is the whip-fast image of a drive-by shooting, laughing while she’s bleeding out. One’s fiction and the other’s not, and it’s hard to say which is which, but both are true. Southerners wrote these stories, so are they ‘southern writers’ in any meaningful way? Or just skilled storytellers?

Growing up a military brat, Conroy may have sought to depict a place to which he could anchor himself–and the low country is so swept by vague mists as to be forever mysterious. Karr herself took the New York route, using literature as an anchor before she found she needed religion to stay stable. In a sense you might say she’s Conroy’s Savannah. The inside joke Conroy had to be aware of: poets can’t live on their writing–not in Manhattan–not even in Dubuque.

If you’re going to steal, grab from the best. And if you believe what they’re writing is important, you can try making it your own.

Back in prehistoric times in the 80s when I began the earliest version of Kill Devil, all I knew about my female protagonist was the name on her driver’s license: Brandy Jo Lowery, nicknamed ‘BJ’. That and she hailed from the east Texas bayous. The policeman was even more vague in my mine; he was so taciturn he was innocuous, but BJ was going to be the example of a desperate girl fleeing her childhood and striving for salvation. I knew her before I figured out him. I knew several savaged women in my life, and I always wanted to save them–that was what my ex-wife said–though it seemed I could never save her.

But if I was going to write BJ as someone with a sad history, at some point I needed to produce it. Not enogh to say “she was terribly sad but then got over it.” Then in the 90s, I read Liars’ Club.

So that’s the Kill Devil story. Big reveal, right?

I was struck by Liar’s Club, beginning with the kick ass title. A memoir purporting truth about the southern tradition of a liar’s club? I knew nothing of Karr’s background except what I was reading, and so Liar’s Club unsettled me. How could someone survive that kind of upbringing–if you’d call that an upbringing. Hell, she was raising herself, and I figured it was going to end badly. Page by page I kept expecting worse eruptions to rain down on the poor child—which they did. [spoiler alert] Hard to read but I kept on.

At the writer’s conference, when I read aloud my blurb written Kill Devil and mentioned the story’s setting in the 80s, Anne Hawley said “that’s important to say in the blurb–it’s history now.” The 80s are history? How could they be; I lived them.

Years after I’d read her second memoir, Cherry, Karr’s literary background leaked out (or it was when I first came on it). It was as if the myth of a wild child was blown to dust devils. She’d become a poet who taught literature? Judged by Liars’ Club, it was obvious Karr could write, however…

“She… enrolled in a graduate writing programme that was taught by Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Louise Gluck, Richard Ford, Charles Simic, Robert Hass and other luminaries. She writes poems and criticism, and tells me she has a lot more money since she wrote The Liars' Club. She got married, and divorced. She has a son who is 15, and when I ask her if she would write about herself now, rather than just her childhood, she says she thinks her boyfriend 'would probably blow his brains out'.”

from Exactly as She Remembers It by Gaby Wood, published 2001 in The Guardian.

In the quote, there’s that landing she sticks again. The liars club she describes in her memoir is a bunch of hard-drinking wisecracking storytellers, each story with a landing that either worked or it didn’t. The story fails if you can’t stick the landing.

Karr is someone I know. Conroy knew her too; he wrote Savannah in the image of another poet, his sister Carol, though it could have been Karr. The difference is that in Conroy’s writing he declares himself staunchly on the side of the living, and Karr’s voice in Liars’ Club is an uncertain child’s. My son, Ryan was uncertain. I know that child.

It takes a dense person to see their gender as the definition of a life, or the other way around, though at times we all scurry about doing that. Generation after each, seems we’re working to relearn the same lesson. Yet if gender is all we’re concerned with, we may well be missing the rest of the universe. And it’s said dogs are simple creatures. At least dogs aren’t confused about the subject.

Again and again, Tom Wingo argues with Lowenstein that he’s a man’s man–yet he declares he’s also a feminist. Mary Karr’s young girl won’t be satisfied until she can find herself the way boys have been expected to find themselves–by running at brick walls until either they vault them, bust through or break themselves trying.

“Within ten minutes we were happily documenting our interaction… with a selfie. ‘Tits up, ho!’ Mary advised as she pressed the button.”

from The Truth Keeps You Young by Lena Dunham, published in The Paris Review in 2015.

Conroy and Karr are authors I admire. I came to Conroy very late but came through a line of authors I’m proud to claim for antecedents: London, Forester, Tolkien, Zelazny, Dick, Le Guin. I read all of Bruce Catton’s books on the Civil War by the time my voice started to crack, and I was impressed by the feat if no one else was. And when my first marriage fell apart and I set out on my own, a counselor suggested I read YB Yates. His heart, broken by Maude Gonne as a younger man, followed him through a life of poems. As his writing matured, however, it revealed to me how poetry could go deeper than rhyming schemes, albeit his were masterful. Yeats’ Meditations in the Time of Civil War is magnificent. Though I digress…