Maury Povich Pushed Connie Chung to Write Her Memoir

Connie Chung may never have written her bestselling memoir without the support of husband Maury Povich.

Speaking at an event in New York City on April 23, in which Chung was honored with the Silurians Press Club’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, the broadcast news journalist, 78, gave a special shoutout to Povich, 86, who helped push her to write her 2024 book Connie.

“I had never thought that I had a story to tell,” Chung said. “But my husband Maury Povich, who’s been determining the paternity of every child in America … Maury said, ‘You have a story to tell.’ And I said, ‘I don’t have a story to tell.’ And he said, ‘No, yes you do. You’re the Jackie Robinson of news.’”

“It was so hard to write,” Chung added of the memoir. “So hard. I’ve never done anything like it. Television stories [aren’t] that long, and a book goes on and on and on.”

The couple first met at local Washington D.C. news station WTTG-TV Channel 5, where Povich worked as a co-anchor and Chung as a copygirl. The couple married in 1984, and adopted their son, Matthew, soon after Chung was fired from her “dream job” at ABC News, Chung said.

“My husband and I had been working on an adoption, because first I forgot to get married, then I forgot to have a baby,” Chung said. “So finally my husband said, ‘I know you want to have a baby.’ We decided to work on an adoption.”

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“When CBS had offered me a consolation prize instead of co-anchoring with Dan Rather — I could substitute for him and have my own news on Saturday and Sunday and do documentaries and things — I said, ‘You can take this job and shove it,’” Chung added. “Because I decided I would have a new life raising my son. And our son was less than a day old when he was in our arms.”

Chung previously told PEOPLE that she and the Maury host still butt heads occasionally, despite their long marriage and similar careers.

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“If we’re having a fight at night, he wants to make up before we go to sleep. But when I wake up in the morning, I want to keep fighting. I’m not finished,” Chung says. “I think that’s the way a lot of women are, anyway. You got to get it out.”

But even when they squabble, the couple always has each other’s backs, professionally and personally.

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“He has a wider vocabulary, I assure you, than ‘You are the father’ or ‘You are not the father,” she joked. “He’s a voracious reader and he is a very solid journalist … he takes his work seriously, but he always told me, don’t take yourself so seriously … I think that’s how we stayed grounded.”