A Common Pornography: A Memoir

I loved Kevin Sampsell's A Common Pornography. Though by "loved" I mean "was impressed and cringed a lot." This collection of short "memory experiments" runs the gamut from hilarious to heartbreaking, and Sampsell has an incredible knack for illuminating teen angst and family dysfunction with his vivid prose and off-kilter sensibility. Very weird and very good.

by Sheila A.

Composed of brief, chronological accounts, A Common Pornography is Kevin Sampsell's unabashedly frank memoir. Recounting the formative incidents of his youth, Sampsell writes with great courage about family drama, sexual exploration, and the inevitable uncertainties of adolescence. Written without pathos, sentimentalism, or apology, Sampsell never resorts to the banal, woe-is-me affectations that have come to mark so many autobiographical works of late. Funny, tragic, touching, and often unbelievable, A Common Pornography is the true tale of one man's precarious and often arduous journey into adulthood.

by Jeremy

A Common Pornography is a uniquely crafted, two-pronged memory experiment: a collection of sweet and funny snapshots from his childhood, and an unsensational portrait of a family in crisis. Sampsell blends the catastrophic with the mundane and the humorous with the horrific. From his mother's first tumultuous marriages and his father's shocking abuse of his half sister to Kevin's own memories of first jobs, first bands, and first loves, here is a searing, intensely honest memoir that exposes the many haunting shades of a family — both its tragedy and its resiliency.

In 2008 Kevin′s estranged father died of an aneurysm. When he returned home to Kennewick, Washington for the funeral, Kevin′s mother revealed to him disturbing threads in their family history -- stories of incest, madness, betrayal, and death -- which retroactively colored Kevin′s memories of his upbringing and youth. He learned of his mother′s first two husbands, the fathers of his three older, mythologized half-siblings, and the havoc they wreaked on his mother. He learned of his own father′s seething resentment of his step-children, which was expressed in physical, pyschological, and sexual abuse. And he learned more about his oldest step-sister, Elinda, who, as a young girl, was labeled "feebleminded" by a teacher. When she became a teenager, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital. She entered the clinic at 98 pounds. She left two years later 200 pounds, diabetic, having endured numerous shock treatments. Then, after finally returning home, she was made pregnant by Kevin′s father. Only at the end of the book do we learn what chance in life a person like this has.

While his family′s story provides the framework of the book, what′s left in between is Kevin′s story of growing up in the Pacific Northwest. He tells of his first jobs, first bands, first loves, and one worn, teal blue suitcase filled with the choicest porn in all of Kennewick, Washington.

Employing the same form of memoir as he did in his previous book, Kevin intertwines the tragic with the everyday, the dysfunctional with the fun, lending A COMMON PORNOGRAPHY its undeniable, unsensationalized reality. The elastic conceit of his "memory experiment" captures the many shades and the whole of the Sampsell family -- both its tragedy and its resiliency. Kevin relates this history in a charming, honest, insightful, and funny voice.