A Common Pornography: A Memoir by Kevin Sampsell
Many thanks to Mr. Sampsell for putting me on the list to receive his book. My apologies for not getting to read it fast enough and for not writing this review sooner.
I know nothing of Kevin Sampsell. I’d never heard of him or his publishing house - Future Tense Publishing - before the Crybaby Publicist* put me in touch with him. So I came into A Common Pornography a blank slate. I must say how grateful I am that Mr. Sampsell totes his book as a “memory experiment”. Memoir is a tricky genre, I usually shy away from it. Often times memories are presented as fact rather than an extremely opinionated view of events. Writers of memoir will say, all this happened, but I changed some of it. Bah! But reading A Common Pornography is like sitting on a couch with Kevin Sampsell and you only have an hour before someone walks in you, so he opens a photo album and starts flipping through the pictures at a rapid pace, giving the reader only the slightest context of each scene before moving on to the next shot.
What prompted the writing of A Common Pornography was the death of Mr. Sampsell’s father. During the time Mr. Sampsell returns home for the funeral he learns horrors about his father and one of his siblings. That’s all I’ll say about that because that seems to be the hook for the book. What I found however was that these atrocities were still so fresh for Mr. Sampsell that he can barely talk about them. And the events themselves take up very little time or energy in the book. Instead Mr. Sampsell frames his early life by these events and what he sticks in-between is the crappy, fluffy, filling you find in Twinkies or Oreos. His own story was not that out of the ordinary to write an entire book about. But I can understand why he wanted to try. What happens within Mr. Sampsell’s family is pure evil, but it’s not really his story to tell since he wasn’t remotely involved. So we just get mention of these horrible events and lots and lots of quick quirky little blurbs about being a teenager, liking girls, drinking, wanting to be in a band, and getting jacked-off by other guys. None of which is really outstanding or touching. Mr. Sampsell writes away from himself giving us only the memory - the picture - and then somehow removing all emotion from the telling of the tale. For a book written about his life, I still don’t feel like I know anything about him.
Because A Common Pornography was written as a memory experiment, the memories or snapshots aren’t that long, nor are they explored at any length. For lack of a better word you could say that this book was broken up into “chapters”, but I hesitate to say it that way. The titles of each chapter or memory seem more like words hastily written on the back of a photograph. Then you flip the picture over and see two kids playing air guitar or a young man getting a hand-job on a couch. And no matter how long you look at that photograph it only gives you a certain amount of information. There are no little clues or hidden meanings. It is what it is.
Make no mistake, Mr. Sampsell is a deft and talented writer. It takes an immeasurable amount of courage to put the best and worst of yourself down on paper; to pop open the secrets of your family like a can of new tennis balls. And the style in which A Common Pornography was written is quite fresh. But I feel that Mr. Sampsell keeps his readers at arms length, almost as a warning; as if to say,here is all the really bad stuff - if you still like me after this, then we’ll talk. Okay man, let’s talk.
(*The Crybaby Publicist contacted me through Bookclub Bitches and sent me a book. When the review/podcast was not to her liking she sent me an e-mail telling me how she didn’t like the way BCB did things. Obviously, she didn’t research BCB at alll since we’re pretty obvious about what we do and pretty open about the BILF system. She stomped her foot and said she wasn’t going to send us anything more (fine with me), but before that she put me in touch with Mr. Sampsell. So something really great came out of the whole thing.)
