Customer Reviews

A Common Pornography: A Memoir (P.S.)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Each page features a short little episode from the author's childhood. Some very funny stuff happens. Space shuttles, pop star dreams, dirty magazine hiding, first girlfriends with dirty teeth. It's all very poignant and resonant. A well-done work.

Despite the bad publicity of a few memoirs by people who were later determined to be less than truthful, the genre is still flourishing. I recently reviewed The Kids Are All Right, the story of the four Welch siblings, who were left orphaned after their father's death in a car accident and their mother's death by cancer a short time later.

The four siblings took turns writing about their memories in short, one and two page sections. It has been said that each child in a family grows up with different parents, and their story illustrates that point.

Kevin Sampsell's memoir "A Common Pornography" is written in a similar style. His one-and-two page mini-essays read like diary entries. Reading them is like sitting with Sampsell while he is looking at a family photo album, each page a picture triggering a memory. The pictures add up to a life lived in a family that is deeply troubled.

Sampsell has two older half-brothers who were pretty much out of the house by the time he could remember. His half-sister spent ten years in a psychiatric hospital, and while there gave birth to a child who was taken from her. She later married an abusive man who pimped her out for sex to other men. She again got pregnant and again gave up her baby. She was impregnated once more, this time by her stepfather, Kevin's father.

Two other brothers lived with Kevin, one of whom was black. Matt was the product of an affair that Kevin's mother had with an African man when she and Kevin's father had been estranged. Kevin describes a beautiful story Matt told him about going to Africa and meeting his father's relatives. He had several mannerisms of his father, and they were mesmerized by this young man who looked and acted so much like their deceased relative.

Out of this sad, violent, strange family, Kevin managed to grow up. His stories of loneliness, isolation and attempts to connect with girls are heartbreaking, and yet familiar to many. His description of working at a donut shop and the friends he made there had me flashing back to my first job working at a movie theater.

His stories about his his father's funeral and the feelings it triggers in him and his siblings almost hurt to read. His brother Mark, the one who stayed behind to care for his ill father, seems almost totally unable to function as an adult. Following the funeral, Kevin's mother attempts to share all of the secrets that she had been keeping, answers to questions the children were never allowed to ask.

A Common Pornography is heartbreakingly sad, speared with humor, yet above all it is honest. Sampsell speaks truth to the difficulty of finding oneself in this lonely world, made all the more frightening by the horrible dysfunction he grew up in. It is not for everyone, there is rough language and tough situations, and it is not written like a conventional memoir, but many will find it comforting to know that there are people out there who share their struggles.

This is the first time I've read Sampsell's work beyond the McSweeney's website, and I found it enormously touching, provocative, sentimental (in a good, just heard Shake It Up on the radio sort of way), and inspiring. I've never enjoyed the memoir genre until I read this book. Pick it up. I guarantee it will haunt you.

Growing up, Kevin always thought his family was normal, but when he returned home for his father's funeral, he realized that maybe they weren't. After spending some time talking with his mother and siblings he discovered some things about his family's past that were somewhat disturbing.

A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell is very difficult to describe. Technically, it's a memoir, but it's written differently than any memoir I've ever read. Instead of being written as a straight narrative, it's written as a series of short vignettes. They are written in chronological order, so it's easy to follow Kevin's story, and what a story it is! Kevin is very open and honest in this memoir and shares his family's dysfunction as well as details of his teen-age years, such as keeping his stash of pornography hidden in the ceiling of his bedroom and learning to play an instrument so he could join a band.

After I read this book, I thought maybe there was a definition of pornography that I wasn't familiar with and I found that it has two meanings - the one most people are familiar with and "the depictions of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction." I think the title of this book refers to both definitions.

I found A Common Pornography to be a quick and entertaining read, but it left me wanting more. The book is both funny and sad, but I really didn't feel connected to Kevin and I wanted to know more about the rest of his family. I think I would rate this one very good, but not great. There is some language and sexual content in this book. I struggled with the number of stars to give this one - I'd give it 3 1/2 if half stars were allowed.

This is the perfect book to accompany a quiet Friday night spent drinking wine in bed. Or a Sunday morning on the backporch sipping gas station coffee from a styrofoam cup. The stories within are short, tight, and disturbingly honest. The books flows so well, and holds the reader's interest to such an extent, that setting the book down once it is begun seems an impossibility.

When I was in college, I took a memoir writing class and received a piece of advice from my professor I completely agree with and keep in mind when I read memoir. Her advice was not to write a woe-is-me whinefest focusing soley on the bad things in your life.
Unfortunately Sampsell never had this professor. The memoir is made up mostly of bad memories about his childhood and specifically his father, interlaced with his experiences with sex and pornography. The result is a memoir that never breaks from gritty, dirty, and depressing.
The few portions about having fun with his friends playing basketball or dancing at a club aren't enough to break through the grim storyline.

I chose this book partly because I have met Kevin Sampsell, but mostly because it is a memoir written in short vignettes. Ever since reading The House on Mango Street in high school I have been enthralled with a novel told in vignette form. I have yet to read one done as beautifully as The House on Mango Street, but I am not giving up yet.

As many of the vignettes in this book were previosuly published as short stories, there are often times when it feels more like a collection of short stories than a collection of vingettes with a connecting story arc. Indeed, there isn't much of a story arc except that it flows from his childhood to present day life.

This is the kind of collection that will inevitably spark memories from the readers. And probably not happy memories, so be prepared for a haze of gloom to appear above your head while reading this.

It was a very quick, interesting read, and Sampsell uses great details to illustrate his stories, but I am gravely disappointed in its darkness. I had expected some startling and saddening tales of childhood woe, but I had also expected some dark humour and happy highlights as well. It just didn't feel balanced to me.

He also doesn't describe his characters very well. His mother and siblings are mere ghosts, and his father is the only one he really tries to go into but fails there as well. We are left with Sampsell's feelings, his views, but on characters barely developed.

His relationships with women are repetitious (his stories are mostly the same of each one, and they are not developed much either) and he never seems to grow as a person or to really love any of them, rather they are merely sexual objects to him. Perhaps that was his point, but it leaves me wondering why bother devoting stories to them? He could have just listed them and moved on to something else.

A Common Pornography is a memoir, but one that breaks the mold of what a memoir should be. Told in a series of vignettes, at the heart of the story is Sampsell's relationship with his father, an angry and brutal man. While stories of his father bookend the narrative of the memoir, what makes up the meat of this story is vignette after vignette of Sampsell relating memories from his adolescence and young adult. They are not often connected, but underneath each story runs a current of trauma.

It's true that Sampsell's father was a despicable man, who does some absolutely horrible, unforgivable things. But nothing is every so simple, no person is truly evil, and Sampsell does not paint his father in a child's unambiguous terms. His father is the kind of man that can abuse his children, but lovingly bury a family pet with tears in his eyes. Does Sampsell ever connect the ways in which he struggled, with finding direction and his relationships with women? Not explicitly, but that is the suggestion.

If the title is any kind of hint, this memoir is not necessarily for the faint of heart. Sampsell leaves no stone unturned, from tales of his first experiences with sex and pornography to drug use to the abuse he witnessed as a child. The structure of this memoir serves the heavy topics well, because the reader never dwells for very long in a certain memory, and Sampsell's pacing is perfect. He keeps the tragedy of his life from outweighing the good memories, even in the structure of his memoir.

In a lot of ways, though perhaps Sampsell has more sadnesses in his life than most, it is perfectly ordinary. Sampsell's story is not necessarily unique, but it is one that deserves to be told, and one I'm so glad I read. Reflective and emotional, but also fragmented, I don't think this is a memoir that will appeal to everyone. But for me? I couldn't stop reading it.

I try to review only books on Amazon which have no previous reviews, but I am breaking that rule with "A Common Pornography," because it was one of my favorite books of the year.

Kevin Sampsell is a familiar name in the indie publishing world, having been a performer and publisher for over two decades now, and "A Common Pornography" is a muscular book which embraces and subverts the tropes of both worlds.

Sampsell tells the history of himself and his family is short, self-contained chapters. Moving forward and backward in time, obsessing over than abandoning subjects, and being brutally, sometimes painfully honest, Sampsell invites us into his story the way a friend would: via anecdote and detail. The shortness of the chapters allow the reader bite-size views into Sampsell's life, and as the chapters build up, the reader is able to fully navigate the sometimes sharp turns in the narrative: funny teenage stories bumped up against stories of abuse, endearing moments bumped up against enraging ones, etc.... Like learning a language through immersion, the reader builds up his/her comfortability level and the effect is intoxicating. By the end of the book, you feel like Sampsell is an old friend and that his history is one you share.

I've given this book as a gift several times since it was released to various writer pals of mine. Because while you could exhaust a dictionary finding adjectives to describe it -- innovative, real, surreal, brutal, nostalgic, angry, funny, painful, honest -- I think the best one to describe it is a simple one: brave.

Great book which offers an intimate look into Kevin's life and relationships. Despite the the huge differences in lives that we have lived, there were always those truly "human" moments that anyone can connect to.

A common pornography reads like a dairy. It's a collection of short essays about his life. I was moved by his honesty. Great read.