Rebecca's Interview with Campbell Armstrong

Author of
I hope you have a good life

Rebecca :
I am so glad you made contact & asked me to review I hope you have a good life which in the UK is titled: All That Really Matters. Being an adopted child myself, I felt a pull toward your memoir of Eileen's story of her giving away her daughter. Tell my readers why you wrote this book?

Campbell :
I wrote it because Eileen asked me to. It's really that simple. She was dying, she was filled with a sense of an ending, all that uncertainty and fear of the encroaching darkness, and she wanted the story of herself and her long-lost daughter told. It struck me as a magical, human story that deserved to be told.

Rebecca :
In this day & age when women often choose single parenthood(as I did), can you describe some of the pressures Eileen was under at the age of 16 in the 1950s of Scotland?

Campbell :
Sure. The real pressure was from the family. Hers was Jewish Orthodox - although she never subscribed to that herself in later life - and her pregnancy was a family disgrace. You were stigmatized back then. The single mother, the bastard child. It was socially unacceptable. In Eileen's case, given the religious background, she would have been an outcast.

Rebecca :
I enjoyed your descriptions of Glasgow of your youth, the music store where you worked for a while & the record department in the basement where you & Eileen first met. When you look at how far you both traveled from sooty old Glasgow, to Southern England to upstate New York to the desert of Arizona, why did you choose Ireland to live now?

Campbell :
I didn't want to stay in America any more - too gun-happy. I also felt a deterioration in the fabric of American life, the rampant materialism, the dulling of a culture, the increasing simplicity of education. I still liked the country, but I just had a feeling I needed to move on. Ireland hadn't quite deteriorated that same way, it was still relatively unspoiled; and the Irish government is kind in tax matters to writers & artists. It's a lovely country. It's heading toward a freeway-shopping-mall culture, no doubt...meantime, it has more simple attractions, and a pace of life I find very bearable.

Rebecca :
Oswego, on the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York gave you your first taste of American snow - mine was in Chicago - & the wilder side of academia. The separation between husbands & wives seemed so much a part of our cultures in the 1960s & 19070s: he goes off to work in his own world while she stays home in her own world of hearth & family. It seemed inevitable that you two would evolve away from each other. What have you learnt about marriage?

Campbell :
Wow, what a deep question! Have I learned anything? Maybe just this - you have to have ongoing open communication; secrets are taboo; you have to share an interest (or demonstrate some kind of sympathy) in your spouse's work, her sphere of activity. That's simple stuff, I know, but hard to make it work all the time. And trust - ah, yes, let's not leave that one out. As it happens, I love and admire my wife, and the fact she puts up with my absent-mindedness and mismatched socks - she's strong, stronger than me. I think women are stronger than men anyway. I've been married to two of them, and I think I've been privileged.

Rebecca :
I was tickled by you description of the smoking lounge at the airport. Smoking was such an integral part of our youth we thought nothing about it. When the air raid sirens howled the “All Clear” you'd see hundreds of folks surfacing from bomb shelters & light up with relief. How times have changed! Eileen had quit smoking for several years when she was diagnosed. Along with that habit we also picked up alcohol & drugs. There are so many ways to numb our sorrows. Now that you are a diabetic & can no longer misuse alcohol, how is your writing?

Campbell :
The alcohol was dropped before the discovery of diabetes. The drugs were stopped long before the alcohol. I have none of those eye-socket wrenching hangovers any more, thank God. I don't smell of tobacco or yesterday's booze. I don't deteriorate in public-houses and fall from bar-stools. I'm no longer the life & soul of the party - if indeed I ever was. I live quietly, I watch some TV, I read a lot. I haven't found a way to numb any sorrows - I try not to have them, not always successfully.

Disappointments are another thing where the little crutches of tobacco and booze and drugs would sustain you - you know, a bad review, a book that doesn't sell, an editor who lets you down, a person who doesn't keep his/her word: but you learn to live with all that, and then just keep on trucking. Anyway, if I was to try and numb feelings with substances, the feelings only go away for a short time, and they're worse when they come back.

Rebecca :
How did you keep your tenses straight? Into the present with Eileen's last year of life; into the past remembering your years together; the births of your sons; into the present with your adult sons & Eileen's intense struggle; back to another time & place in your marriage & then, suddenly, Barbara arrives.

Campbell :
Really, I don't have a conscious answer to that: most of the arrangement of narrative was subconscious stuff, where all the 'story' judgements are made. I guess certain tenses just struck me as right, and I went with them. I made one early attempt to write it all in the past tense, but I felt totally ill-at-ease. Warning lights were going off in my head. Writers need to listen to their inner policemen and the sound of sirens and those flashing lights.

Rebecca :
When it took Barbara 20 years to locate her mother, how did you feel when you received all those communications between the adopting couple, the Wilsons, & the adoption society's correspondent?

Campbell :
Oh, that was wonderful, all those old letters, typewritten, some of them struck so hard with the keys there were little holes in the paper. Old documents, handwritten notes, the names of people long dead or missing - that was the detective part of the book, putting together the early years in the lives of people I'd never meet. I felt like an academic, an historian, trying to arrange the sequence of old documents. That was one of the most intriguing chapters for me to write. I got great joy out of that moment when Barbara's adoptive parents finally get her as a baby girl. I was also saddened when Eileen was obliged to give up her child.

Rebecca :
Did honoring Eileen's deathbed request that you write their story, take you by the earlobe & demand your full attention? Previously you have written fiction, in what ways has your writing changed?

Campbell :
It demanded more than my attention; it demanded, for nine months, most of my life. I was utterly driven to write this book, and get the story out, and I'm just as driven to get as many people to read it as I can - because Eileen and Barbara were two terrific people, and their story - sad, some say, but uplifting in a way - was one of love and determination and cruel coincidence. Writing it, I had sleepless nights, I sat at the keyboard with tears running down my face...This was a long way from writing a work of fiction. Usually, with fiction, you have control. You invent the world. In I Hope You Had A Good Life I was reporting on true events and true emotions.

I've since written a novel which will come out next year and I think some of what I learned from writing the memoir will overflow into the novel - which has more family material than I usually have in my books, and is perhaps more deeply felt.

Rebecca :
What are you up to now?

Campbell :
After the novel I've just finished, The Bad Fire, I owe my publisher another novel. It is set in Dublin and tentatively entitled Say Goodbye, and is based on the true story of a young American woman who moved to Ireland to live, and subsequently vanished off the face of the earth. It's about her father's search for her: about family, and longing, and melancholy, and tension - a lot of tension, I hope. It's a kind of mystery story, but I hope there's more to it than that.

Rebecca :
Is there anything else you'd like to say? Do you have any book signings you'd like listed in Authors Sightings?

Campbell :
I'm planning to be in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Francisco in April 2001, in connection with the memoir. Dates and places have yet to be arranged.

Rebecca :
Campbell, I thank you for, I hope you have a good life.

Do check out my review of I hope you have a good life.

(Published December 17, 2000)