I Hope You Have A Good Life - True Story Of Love, Loss, And Redemption [Paperback]

Campbell Armstrong (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; First Edition edition (2000)
• ASIN: B002D927X4
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)

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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.