I Hope You Have a Good Life: A True Story of Love, Loss and Redemption [Paperback]

Campbell Armstrong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 26, 2002

“I Hope You Have a Good Life addresses the most fundamental questions about adoption, families, life, and love. . . . Heartbreaking and beautiful.” —Publishers Weekly

“A passionate memoir of love retrieved.” —The Times (London)

“Campbell Amstrong understands and communicates the devotion of mother and daughter and the special poignancy of their brief and stress-filled time together.” —Kirkus Reviews

The remarkable story of two extraordinary women who had to live a whole lifetime of caring in a few short weeks.

When Campbell Armstrong and his first wife became lovers, she shared her most intimate secret with him—as a teenager she had given up her first child for adoption. Years later, at the side of his ex-wife, Armstrong witnessed a mother and daughter unite in the most overwhelming circumstances.

With compassion and empathy, Armstrong presents the triumphant reunion of his estranged family with a delicate grace that captivates the joy and despair, sadness and laughter they felt when joined. He paints a beautiful and unforgettable portrait of a mother and daughter brought together out of desperation, but whose lives ultimately provide an uplifting, redemptive story.

I Hope You Have a Good Life is an inspirational memoir, a testament to the human spirit and to the ability of families to reunite when it matters most.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A memoir written as a promise to a dying loved one is bound to be a heart-wrenching tale, and in I Hope You Have a Good Life, novelist Campbell Armstrong delivers. The book is a paean to his former wife, Eileen, who died of cancer in 1998. It's also a tribute to her daughter, Barbara, whose decades-long search for her biological mother ended in the discovery that they shared the same devastating disease. In reading about Eileen's courageous battle, her reunion with the daughter she gave up at the age of 17, and the support of her stalwart friends, we enter a small circle of strong, fighting women.

At his best, Armstrong paints these women with a gentle, almost reverent brush, portraying the lives of ordinary people striving to surmount overwhelming circumstances. Unfortunately, however, this loving picture is framed against the intrusive backdrop of his own struggles: substance abuse, affairs, alcoholism, his frequent uprooting of his family. While he's straying into his attempts to dry out and subsequent lapses into what he terms "Slipsville," one wonders impatiently when Barbara will finally make contact. Whether Armstrong chose to highlight Eileen and Barbara's courage by contrasting it with his own failures is uncertain, but the result is not exactly flattering.

The author's regretful musings on life and death are sometimes insightful, but more often, they distract. His narration, however, is engaging. Glimpses of the young couple's beginnings in 1960s Glasgow fascinate but are fleeting, and it's not until Armstrong's persona steps out and Barbara's search for her mother comes forward that the reader really becomes involved. Ultimately, Eileen's final days of fear and hope, the unswerving devotion of her newfound daughter, and the emerging strength of her three sons are a moving testament to the power of family--extended, reunited, troubled, or otherwise. It's with the vividness of this portrait that Armstrong fulfills his promise to Eileen. --Lisa Costantino --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Heartbreaking and beautiful, Armstrong's memoir turns on a family drama fraught with savage irony: a mother and the out-of-wedlock daughter whom she abandoned shortly after birth are reunited after 42 yearsAbut both are suffering from advanced cancer. The mother in question, Armstrong's ex-wife Eileen, was 17 in 1955 when, at her parents' insistence, she gave up her baby, Barbara, for adoption (the baby's 28-year-old father dropped out of the picture). "I love you. I hope you have a good life," Eileen whispered to the infant, devastated. Barbara's momentous weeks-long reunion in Phoenix with her dying mother, whom she spent years trying to locate, is deeply moving. Glasgow-born novelist Armstrong had a troubled marriage with Eileen amid his bouts of heavy drinking and affairs, leading up to family counseling that failed to extricate him from his love affair with the woman who is now his wife. Having remained in touch with his ex-wife, Armstrong was also reunited at Eileen's deathbed with their three sons, and ruefully examines his own failings as a father. Barbara, still fighting her own illness, becomes an integral part of her half-brothers' lives, almost a surrogate mother. A masterful diagnostician of the human heart, Armstrong writes sensuously, with ruthless candor and wisdom about the wilting of relationships, the courage ordinary people muster to survive, the way tragedy can bring a family together, and how we all die alone. Few will read this intense book with dry eyes. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (February 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609807226
• ISBN-13: 978-0609807224
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,063,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sort of Grace, September 3, 2000

By 

Michael Marsh (Elgin, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Hope You Have A Good Life: A True Story of Love, Loss and Redemption (Hardcover)

In a memoir every bit as compelling as his signature fast-paced literary thrillers (Jig, Jigsaw), Campbell Armstrong recounts a true and often heartrending tale of love and loss, guilt and redemption. In I Hope You Have a Good Life, Armstrong tells the story of his former wife Eileen, who after a valiant struggle with lung cancer died in February, 1998, and of Eileen's long-lost daughter Barbara, who--given up for adoption when Eileen was seventeen--relentlessy sought a mother she never knew across a gulf of four decades and seemingly insurmountable odds. Artfully intertwined with this is the story of a man on the lam from himself and his demons, and a family fragmented because of it. Almost as if we are in one of Armstrong's thrillers, we are swept from the sooty streets of Glasgow in the early sixties to mod London's cultural revolution later that decade; and from the winter blizzards of upstate New York in the seventies to the sledgehammer heat of a recent Phoenix summer. Through these times and locales Armstrong weaves the strands of a young woman's whispered confession in a candle-lit tent and, forty years later, her whispered deathbed request; of a writer's obsessive quest up from the dissolution of alcohol and drugs to find some sort of grace; and of another woman's search for her mother urged on by an impending sense that time is running out. As the strands converge, the writer achieves a sort of redemption through a promise finally kept, and the woman finds a mother's love at the last moment. In an age of literary "catharsis," the memoir has become a sort of industry too often based on the kind of neurasthenic twaddle spun from what granny did to one in the woodshed at the age of five. I Hope You Have a Good Life is a welcome departure from this. Campbell Armstrong stares at the sun without blinking, writing with skill and unstinting honesty of personal failings and the struggle to put things right, of promises exacted and at long last kept, and of a family reunited by death and by the transcendent power of enduring love.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book to Cherish, September 3, 2000

By 

Pamela Walker (Boston MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Hope You Have A Good Life: A True Story of Love, Loss and Redemption (Hardcover)

I absolutely loved "I Hope You Have a Good Life." It was one of those special books that I couldn't wait to get to after I'd put my girls down at night. I'd reach the end of a chapter, look at the clock and know I should get to sleep, but then make the "mistake" of reading the first sentence of the next chapter and be hooked. And now I'm sad it's over.

Campbell Armstrong tells this amazing story with honesty, humility, and love. I was deeply touched by the short but richly fulfilling reunion between the two dying women--his ex-wife and her long-lost daughter.

Tears were pouring down my cheeks last night as I turned the last page. I got up to wash my face, and then I went in to my little girls' rooms to watch them in sleep for a minute and give them one more kiss. Then I got into bed and let my mind drift thru so many memories I have of my own mom. "I Hope You Have A Good Life" definitely reminds you to cherish it ALL.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most touching and well written book I have ever read!, September 8, 2000

By 

Jarno Mattila (Suomi, Finland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Hope You Have A Good Life: A True Story of Love, Loss and Redemption (Hardcover)

What a story! I know Campbell Armstrong is a very good fiction writer but "I Hope You Have A Good Life" is something very special. I was so moved by this book that after I had read it I was deep in thought for a long time, and then I started to read it again! "I Hope You have A Good Life" is a heartbreaking story about separation and reunion of mother and daughter. Incredible description of family love and a life-and-death struggle. It is a great story about life altogether. I recommend this book to everyone.