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    A Common Pornography: A Memoir
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    A Common Pornography: A Memoir
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    A Common Pornography: A Memoir
    Ebook228 pages2 hours

    A Common Pornography: A Memoir

    By Kevin Sampsell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “For beauty, honesty, sheer weirdness, and a haunting evocation of place, Kevin Sampsell is my favorite Oregon writer. Ken Kesey, Chuck Palahniuk—make some room on the shelf.”—Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of it All

    Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir, told in vignettes, that captures the history of one dysfunctional American family. An extension of a 2003 “memory experiment” of the same name, A Common Pornography weaves recollections of small-town youth with darker threads from his family’s story, including incest, madness, betrayal, and death. A regular contributor to Dave Egger’s The Believer and McSweeney’s, Sampsell has written “the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive” (Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life is Twice as Good).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 19, 2010
    ISBN9780061966118
    Unavailable
    A Common Pornography: A Memoir
    Author

    Kevin Sampsell

    Kevin Sampsell has been the publisher of Future Tense Books since 1990. His own books include the short story collections Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets. In 2009, he edited the anthology Portland Noir. He works for Powell's Books and lives in Portland, Oregon.

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    Reviews for A Common Pornography

    3.5/5

    34 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Bet I’m gonna get some interesting new followers and fun spam comments with the word “pornography” in the title of my post, but you know what? It will be totally worth it for the opportunity to talk about this incredibly unique, impossible-to-put-down book. (That’s my new workaround for “unputdownable,” which I know many of you hate. What do you think?)Anyway, let’s talk about A Common Pornography because it really is fascinating. After Kevin Sampsell’s father died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 2008, he returned to the small town in Washington state where he grew up, and as he revisited memories from his childhood, viewing them through the new lens of adulthood and realizing that his life was not nearly as normal as he once thought, his mother revealed new information about his family’s history—including his father’s molestation of his half-sister—that enabled him to put the pieces together in a way he never had before. What resulted from this reflection is the “memory experiment” that forms A Common Pornography.Presented in short vignettes—most pieces in the book are just a few pages—that seem to be a free association of memories about childhood, adolescence, family dysfunction, sexual experiences, and much more, A Common Pornography tells the story of Sampsell’s life through a series of written snapshots. By giving readers insight into the most salient, formative moments of his life—and many mundane ones as well—Sampsell pieces together an autobiography that doesn’t mess around with small talk but instead goes right to the heart of who and how he is and why that is soThe make-up of Sampsell’s family is unusual, consisting of several half-siblings–one of whom is black— from his mother’s two previous marriages, and his relationship with his half-siblings and his father is complicated to say the least. The snapshot vignettes exploring these relationships are remarkably weighty, particularly for such short pieces, and they indicate that what Sampsell has done here goes beyond having a way with words. These pieces pack a strong emotional punch, and Sampsell takes us with him as he forms new understandings of his family following his mother’s revelations.In balance to these darker pieces, Sampsell tells us about his adolescent porn collection (you were waiting for that, weren’t you?), which he first hid behind a tile of his bedroom ceiling, but which, fearing that it would cave in and expose him (this is a BIG porn collection, people), he eventually culled down to a kind of greatest hits collection that he kept in an old blue suitcase in the back of his closet. Reflections on the discovery of pornography and masturbation are a dime a dozen in male coming-of-age stories and memoirs, but Sampsell makes it seem fresh, new, and endearing, and that is the defining feature of this memoir.I like to the think that the title of this book refers not to just to Sampsell’s suitcase porn collection but to humans’ endless fascination with each other. We are innately, insatiably curious about the lives of others, and memoirs, in their way, have become a kind of literary pornography, an opportunity to exercise voyeurism in a socially acceptable way and to peer into experiences that are simultaneously banal and noteworthy. Tolstoy was right; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and it is Sampsell’s ability to see that in his own family and excise the best bits that makes A Common Pornography feel so original. Originally published at The Book Lady's Blog.
    • 4/5
      pretty good
    • 3/5
      I liked the earlier parts of this memoir best. Before Kevin's libido woke up, there were lots of interesting stories about his dysfunctional family, about his friends, about things he was thinking about. After, it was only girls/sex/girls with a sprinkling of non-horndog anecdotes. Which is probably very true-to-life what it's like to be in a young man's head, but not exactly riveting reading.

      I like Sampsell's voice, I like what feels like a certain even-handedness in dealing with his past- a lack of malice that's rare in troubled family memoirs.

    • 4/5
      At the beginning of the book, the author states that the first cable stayed bridge in the United States is in his hometown of Kennewick, WA and opened for traffic in 1978. I guess no one bothered to fact check, that is actually the second cable stayed bridge. The first is in Sitka, AK and was opened in 1972. Not a big deal, I know, but I'm a stickler for details.Fact checking aside, I could relate to the author. We had a lot in common. We both had drop ceilings in our bedrooms, we both hid our contraband up there. We both had older siblings that we didn't really know. We were both tucked in at night with warnings of bed bugs. I had to smile when he talked about those plastic bird whistles. I loved those. I also have fond memories of holding my cassette recorder against the radio and television speakers. I loved mixing my own music too. The book was presented in small sections, some just a paragraph long, some a few pages, most somewhere in between. It didn't read like a memoir though. It felt like I had gotten a hold of Kevin's diary. That made it fun and quick to read. I appreciated that the author didn't spend too much time writing about or glorifying the worst things in his life. He just told his story.
    • 2/5
      Well, it has ups and downs.The book is written in short vignettes, which works well for me. It's an interesting way to write autobiography because it allows you to focus on only the parts that are interesting or engaging. But I started feeling like the book fell in the trap you can get into with this kind of writing where the vignettes seemd a little too disconnected, and they start to have little meaning to the reader,though it's clear that they are significant to the writer.I guess, ultimately, I felt like these were important events in the life of the author, but they weren't written in such a way that I was compelled to finish the book or keep on truckin'.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.Thanks to Harper Perennial for providing me with a review copy.
    • 4/5
      Folks in the book world may recognize this author's name--he's Powell's Bookstore's event coordinator. He's written quite a bit in the past (LIT, Hobart, McSweeney's, Night Train just to name a few journals and web sites, as well as two short story collections of his own) and is the editor of Portland Noir. He's also the publisher of Future Tense Books. But this book is different--this is personal, about his family and his life as a young man that he calls "a memory experiment". Written in short vignettes primarily, this book is brutally honest and gritty. He glosses over nothing--abuse, drugs, sex, relationships of all sorts. He's not the sort to change much of anything to protectthe innocent because frankly, none of them are that innocent. This book is bold and brave and extremely difficult to put down.