Frank Conroy Spoke Frankly, and He Spoke the Truth

Remembering the great writer and his honesty during Mental Health Awareness Month.

Frank Conroy (courtesty of Narrative Magazine)

FROM THE ARCHIVES
The Wall Street Journal 
May 18, 2005 

By Michael Judge

Like so many other writers and believers in what the poet James Wright called the “pure clear word,” I will never forget Frank Conroy, the memoirist, novelist and longtime director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who died of cancer last month at the age of 69. Not because of the wondrous rhythms, humor and truths of Stop-Time, his brilliant memoir and literary debut, first published in 1967, a year after my birth, or any instruction he gave while I was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (I was in the poetry workshop; Frank taught something called “fiction”).

I’ll always remember Frank because he destroyed me on the pool table night after night at Dave’s Fox Head, the roadside bar where I spent most of my nights—and money—in graduate school. (“The long shots are the hard shots, and the hard shots are the side shots!” he used to say with a devilish grin.) And because he…