Coffee with Cassandra King: 'Failed Southern Belle'

You're going to love this. Cassandra King, known to many as Sandra Conroy, wife of novelist Pat Conroy, will be at Park Road Books at 12:30 p.m. Friday for a "Coffee with Cassandra," that is, of course, free and open to the public.

Cassandra King

She'll be talking about her latest book, "The Same Sweet Girls' Guide to Life: Advice from a Failed Southern Belle" (Maiden Lane Press, $15), which grew out of a commencement speech she gave last year at her alma mater, the University of Montevallo in Montevallo, Ala.

I've met Cassandra, and I can certify that she's not a failed anything. But neither is she prissy or insincere or sweety-sweet as are some of our very finest belles. (Now that was truly insincere.)
The advice she gives here will make you smile -- especially if you went to college in the South in the fifties or sixties -- but it's advice you'll want to pass onto your daughters and granddaughters.

The title of the book is tongue-in-cheek, and if you're at Park Road Books on Friday, you must ask Cassandra its origin.

Six pieces of advice are all she gives. One of the wisest is No. Three: "Life Is Going to Break Your Heart."

"If you cannot accept that," she writes, "life will not only break your heart, it will break you as well."
This is the perfect graduation gift.

P.S. You can leave your white gloves at the door.

Even Pulitzer-winning writers misspell mantel

It's got to be one of the most misspelled words in the English language. So we won't be too hard on

Cassandra King

memoirist and Pulitzer-winning journalist Rick Bragg for using the wrong "mantle" in his foreword to Cassandra King's (that's Pat Conroy's wife Sandra Conroy) "The Same Sweet Girls' Guide to Life: Advice from a Failed Southern Belle"  (Maiden Lane Press, $15).

"The writing business is lousy with gentlemen, the way chiggers are prolific in Johnson grass," Bragg writes. "I was just a Southern man, without a title or an old name, or a passed-down Confederate saber to hang over my mantle."

Exactly why you can't always trust spell-check. The "mantle"  Bragg uses is, of course, a cape. The "mantel" he intended is the one over the fireplace. Easy way to remember: The mantel is a shelf. Both words contain the letters "el."

On a happier note, King concludes the Guide's acknowledgments with a shout-out to Conroy.

 "And to the wind beneath my wings," she writes, "the long-suffering Pat Conroy, who shares his life with a failed belle. Just remember there are worse fates."