Full of the joys and the tears one would expect from this remarkable author. Shadowed, in a way, but what one knows is in the cards. Bittersweet! Yes, but recommended.

An honest and insightful memoir about the author’s lifelong friendship with writer Pat Conroy. He explores their relationship in sometimes painful detail but never with malice or bitterness, and the portrait of Conroy that emerges is vivid and sympathetic. An enjoyable and entertaining read.

Having just listened to Pat Conroy read his own book on reading I so wanted more time with Conroy and there was the opportunity to read this book. Be clear it's about Bernie Schein and his relationship with Conroy but if like me you just love all things Conroy this is a worthwhile read. You'll gain additional insight into Conroy and his relationships--not all of it is happy but you knew that if you read Conroy. I've read Conroy's telling of his life in his stories and enjoyed this telling from a different perspective.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Netgalley for a digital galley in exchange for an honest review.

Admittedly, it's my mother that is the Pat Conroy fan. She's read all his books many times. I, on the other hand, have only read Beach Music which IMHO is one of the best books I have ever read. But in reading this, it's not necessarily a need to be a fan of Pat Conroy. This book is more about the friendship (or bromance, if you so wish) between Irish-Catholic American Pat Conroy and Jewish American Bernie Schein, friends since their school years and both authors in their own right.

I liked that Schein was honest in who Pat Conroy the man was -warts and all. Although I wouldn't say this book was riveting, it was certainly informative.

Goodreads review published 01/08/19
Publication Date 03/09/19

Being a Carolina resident, a lover of Pat's books, and having met his widow, I was intrigued by the title of this book, and I am thankful for the opportunity to read it and to learn more about Conroy's life. I love how Bernie Schein describes Conroy, that he "loved people more than he hated them, which meant he could see into your heart and soul like no other, expanding both your world and his, inspiring you to heights you might never have otherwise imagined..." THAT sentence speaks to the core of Pat Conroy, and it explains why Conroy's novels are so evocative, touch on all human emotions, and why many are now popular movies.

Bernie Schein's Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship was quite simply beautiful with shades of ugliness, pain, and suffering. This was an excellent read about a man and his friendships, family and his life and Lowcountry roots. For those of us who identify with Pat Conroy, Bernie Schein's book touched our very souls in many ways. Would definitely recommend this book to Pat Conroy's readers, literary peers, writers and written and spoken word aficionados. Absolutely amazing!

When it came to exposing his personal life in print, Pat Conroy seems to have had little fear despite knowing that numerous members of his family were not going to appreciate his decision to air the family’s dirty laundry in so public a manner. Conroy was so frank about himself and his upbringing that longtime readers of his work easily could see that the man was still carrying emotional baggage from his childhood, but few outsiders could know just how heavy that burden was. Now, Bernie Schein, Pat’s lifetime best friend despite a fifteen-year interruption to their friendship, takes up where Pat left off.

Many Pat Conroy fans came to consider him a personal friend over the decades they read him, so for obvious reasons Schein’s Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship is not an easy book to read – it just hurts too much to watch a friend suffer the way Pat suffered. It is, however, a book that Pat Conroy fans owe it to themselves (and to Pat) to read.

Bernie Schein was a senior in Beaufort High School (South Carolina) when military brat Pat Conroy entered the school as a junior. It was soon obvious that Conroy was going to be a star athlete despite the resentment of the school’s seniors who would have preferred that he fail. What was not immediately so obvious is that he was also going to become a huge social star among the school’s freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. And after Bernie invited Pat to the very first school party of any type he would ever attend, the two became friends for the rest of their lives.

Their friendship started in a 1961 Beaufort High School study hall, and it would not end until the two men said their goodbyes at Pat’s deathbed on March 4, 2016. Along the way, Pat, Bernie, and the rest of their crew managed to avoid the Viet Nam War while Pat and Bernie prepared for careers as school teachers and writers. The two shared a sense of humor that usually saw them trading one verbal putdown after another any time they were together. Each gave as well as he got, but largely due to his alcoholism and the damage that Santini did to his soul, Pat’s vulnerabilities and insecurities were sometimes expressed in bursts of sudden anger and an uncanny ability to hold a grudge for reasons that were often only imagined.

Yes, this is a book for Pat Conroy fans, but as one of those fans, I have to warn you that you will come away from it a little saddened by some of the things you learn about Pat’s interactions with those closest to him. For that reason, this is not always an easy book to read. But Pat, especially near the end of his life, expressed a desire to be as honest with his fans as he could possibly be. He was willing to talk about anything and everything, and Bernie Schein makes sure here that Pat gets his wish. Pat would have approved.

More than anything in the world, Pat Conroy wanted to be the hero in his world, and he worked hard to play that role – often to his own detriment. Little did he realize how big a hero he always was to his readers.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was an entertaining and interesting read. I'm not sure it will appeal to anyone who isn't already a Pat Conroy or Bernie Schein fan. I happen to be a Pat Conroy fan so as soon as I saw the title, I was interested. I enjoyed seeing their friendship and history through Bernie's eyes. Reading about people I was already familiar with through Pat from a different point of view helped me see a fuller picture of their experiences. I also feel like this book is both a wonderful tribute to Pat and a heartfelt tale of friendship which shows the love and messiness that can come with deep, long-lasting relationships, especially when at least one of the friends has lived through deep trauma.

There were a couple of typos that I couldn't get past: "ya'll" should be "y'all," It's a somewhat common mistake but a mistake nonetheless; "Paris Island" is mentioned several times - I'm also from the lowcountry and it's "Parris;' "form" for "from" when he was discussing the writing of Storms of Aquarius; and ""now" for "know" further down when he was discussing Pat spilling the beans to Clark & Seltzer.

Bernie Schein's "Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship" is a book about their friendship. It's not merely a biography of Pat Conroy. This is a memoir where Bernie's life, growth, and relationships factor in as much as if not more than his experiences with Pat. Expecting otherwise may lead to disappointment.

I received this complimentary ARC via NetGalley to read and review.

I first read Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini when I was the young wife of a Marine Corps pilot. The book had just come out and I wasn’t aware at the time of Conroy’s earlier books, The Boo and The Water is Wide. The Great Santini was taken from the author’s own life as the son of a Marine Corps fighter pilot who drank to excess and regularly and brutally beat up his wife and children, both with his words and with his fists. The story took my breath away, because, unfortunately, I could relate all too well. I fell in love with the writer who had buried his pain and rage for so many years until he finally felt compelled to fictionalize it in a tender, funny, agonizing, and beautifully worded novel.

I fell more deeply in love with Pat Conroy after I read his next book, The Lords of Discipline, as he once again turned his past, this time his school years at The Citadel, into a novel depicting the beauty, brutality and racism he experienced or witnessed there. Through these two books, I learned how a man so deeply damaged and flawed by his past could still retain a love of words, of place and of honor, a man who didn’t think living these ideals made him less of a man. Sadly, I hadn’t ever really known that a male could be this way until, through his words, I met Pat Conroy. So in a way, he changed my life, or at least the way I viewed an essential part of it.

I continued to read, through the years, all his novels, and I learned more and more about the man through his writings. The Prince of Tides is probably my favorite in terms of the beauty of his language. Conroy could take a location, a thought, a feeling, and meld it into something so beautiful that the words would simply take your breath away.

Probably needless to say, after all this, is that he is my favorite writer. And most especially, my favorite Southern writer. He loved his South, his Lowcountry, so much that he could make anyone else love it, as well. However, I also know that the demons of his past still weighed heavily on him, and every novel he wrote reflects that in some way. It’s one of the great sorrows of my life that I never got a chance to meet Pat Conroy before he died a few years ago, but that fact brings me to how much I wanted to read this book by his best friend, Bernie Schein. (“Yes, finally, at last we get to the book review,” I’m sure you’re thinking.)

This is a good book about Pat Conroy. Not a great one, but very good. I learned so much more about him, his relationships with others, including his family, and the sorrow and joy they provided him, and that he, in kind, gave to those he loved or met.

The book gives a lot of detail about Pat’s marriages and children, rifts and broken relationships, tenderness and reparations. It explains how some of Pat's stories hurt family members who saw themselves in his characters. Yet, at no time did I sense that the book was gossipy or a tell-all. Pat himself had been honest through the years about the darkness in his life, and he laughed at much of it. He was honest about his father, about his beautiful mother and the grace and passion for words that she instilled in him. This is a deeply emotional book by a friend who still loves Pat dearly and wants the world to know him, his humor and his selflessness, and who knows just as Pat did that all of his pain made his writing more exquisite and relatable to the many readers who fell in love with him as I did.

The one thing that kept me from giving the book a 5-star rating, or thinking that it’s a great book about Pat, is that Bernie Schein spends many pages talking about himself. To his credit, usually all those pages, at some stage, point back to Pat and the friendship between the two. Bernie also seems to love Bernie quite a bit, as well. I overlooked some of that, because he’s funny and just because I know Pat cherished him so much, but it did tend to get annoying when he seemed to be promoting himself here and there as the best, the brightest, the funniest, in all the world.

I’m glad I read this book. It was a wonderful tribute to Pat Conroy, a man who I believe more than any other writer I've read, excels in reaching down into our hearts to find truth and beauty among the bruised baggage that we’re so often afraid to lift the lid on in the light of day.

Thank you to NetGalley and Skyhorse and Arcade Publishing for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

4 stars

This books details the author's friendship with the recently deceased author, Pat Conroy. Mr. Schein and Pat Conroy met when Pat lived in Beaufort, South Carolina while in high school. The author talks about their meeting in high school, and then after them finishing college their residing near or in Beaufort and teaching school. When Mr. Conroy was fired by the School Board in Beaufort he began his book, The Water is Wide. The author talks about all of Pat Conroy's works.

The author and Mr. Conroy had a falling out when Mr. Schein was teaching his step-daughter Emily and they did not speak for 15 years. They did not reconnect until 2005. When Mr. Schein and Pat reconnected, Pat had diabetes and was drinking heavily and not in good physical shape.

I really enjoyed reading about their friendship and especially after they reconnected in 2005. Mr. Schein appears to be a real friend to Pat, but is honest about Pat's shortcomings. The struggles Pat had with alcohol, as detailed by the author, really resonated with me because I have had my own struggles.

The book was fascinating. I really enjoyed reading about one of my favorite authors. The book was very well edited. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

"Pat Conroy" by Bernie Schein. A memoir. A love story.......the love of boyhood friends. Pat Conroy fans will not want to pull themselves away from Pat and Bernie's life journey. A rare look inside Pat, a military brat, and Bernie's, a Jew in the deep South - friendship during high school years, And young teachers in a conservative military community. Readers of Pat's books will recognize some of the characters as friends of their youth and adults hood. Friendship also cemented as they became activists of pro civil rights and anti Vietnam. The tumultuous 60's and early 70s racism was not just Blacks but Jews as well. Through Bernie, the reader shares in the ups and downs of their friendship, Pat's success as a famous writer, his marriages, painful family life, hate and rage of his father,.... Bernie was there. They both were hopeless romantics. Pat, even in youth saw the world through different eyes. The power and essence of beauty. Shortly after the celebration of Pat's 70th birthday, he was diagnosed with pancreatic and and died. The reader will be grateful to share in this friendship and Bernie's tribute to his best friend.