By Sara Books April 22, Everyone has stories, brief anecdotes relating to our history. Our memories are at once humorous and heartbreaking, some retold again and again, some kept private forever. In A Common Pornography , Kevin Sampsell gathers his stories and assembles them into an atypical memoir, and the results are both intimate and intriguing.
It is not until he is a teenager that he gives any thought to his brother being half-black. The way he presents this information is never from a place of overt shock β though some of it had to be β but rather matter of fact. Some chapters are barely more than a paragraph long. Other parts of the book move away from his family and detail his path to adulthood, stories of friends, girls, and longing. As a kid, he starts amassing a collection of dirty magazines and hides them above the drop ceiling tiles of his room.
Eventually, he grows paranoid about their weight and culls the mass to only choice images. With concern for weight again, the collection moves to an old suitcase. His awkwardness mixed with irrepressible teenage lust leads him to losing his virginity to one of the Tri-Cities prostitutes, an experience that of course disappoints and does nothing to make him feel like less of a virgin.
It is only after that night that he begins to have better luck with regular girls. During those years, nothing was quite as good as the conversations and relationships formed on a Friday night. She wore stretch pants with skeletons on them and said her favorite bands were T. Rex and the Stones Roses. He has a way of making a person clear within two sentences that might take other writers two paragraphs.
I also appreciate his candor when it comes to more private moments, moments most people would hesitate to share at all, but still had an effect on their lives. From near-wordless encounters with other men to nights spent alone, he details his search for affection in a very real, honest way. Like many one-time residents of Spokane, Sampsell now lives in Portland. It publishes chapbooks, poetry and short story collections and some paperback novels. This review is part of the Cannonball Read series.
