I hope you have a good life
 Campbell Armstrong
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2000 Crown Publishing, NY USA
  ISBN: 0609605313


This book is available in used condition from $3.25

A True Story of Love, Loss, and Redemption. In Scotland during the 1950s, Eileen gave birth at the age of 16. As a condition of her parents' help she had to give her daughter Barbara away for adoption. 40 years later, as Eileen lies dying of lung cancer in America, Barbara's slow search for her mother comes to fruition.

This is the story of when the author met Eileen, his first wife, a bright & shining woman with a keen sense of curiosity & love of life; about their marriage during the 1960s & 1970s; their sons & their lifestyle; their troubles & joys; their home making in university towns in England & America. Eventually they settled in Arizona where their marriage ended. It is also about that young mother who had kissed her infant goodbye & whispered her love before handing her over.

For almost 20 years this daughter searched, encountering the frustrations most adopted kids meet when seeking their origins - obstructive social workers, legal barriers, misfiled documents & concealment. Barbara had enormous tenacity which at last, in the fall of 1997, led her to her mother's brother. Across the miles & the years this mother & daughter were now facing the same implacable foe.

When Eileen received Barbara's first letter, she was weak & enduring the treatments for the cancer that was eating her alive. As she told her ex-husband later, she wept for a very long time, because she had prayed for news of her daughter. Excited, suffused with sudden bright energy, Eileen immediately phoned Barbara in Yorkshire.

With lively candor & the considerable skills of a best-selling author, Campbell Armstrong has recorded the years of hectic travel & parenting; of genuine marital affection & then the tortuous descent into despair & separation. Yet this husband & wife parted amicably enough, staying connected through their sons until Eileen became too ill & Campbell flew to her side.

In the second half of I hope you have a good life, we meet Barbara, now a middle-aged married woman facing exactly what her birth mother has been facing, continents apart, yet that ineffable umbilicus comes alive again in an intense & heart-wrenching reunion.

As an adopted child myself, & as I've heard from other adoptees, the great dream in our lives is finding our mothers, being welcomed by her & being healed from a loneliness, a separation that is inexplicable. In lieu of that miracle actually happening, now that everyone who might have known anything about me has long since gone on to their just rewards, I hope you have a good life will do just fine.

Very well done - I hope you have a good life (called All That Really Matters in the UK) is Campbell Armstrong's deathbed promise to his beloved Eileen - to tell her story of the love between a mother & a daughter. It is a keeper & will transform the quality of your life - especially if you are adopted or you have ever had to face what 16 year old Eileen faced.

Do check out my Interview with this delightful author!

More from Campbell Armstrong: JIG has been his most popular with 23 printings since 1987. Concert of Ghosts, Agents of Darkness & The Bad Fire.
Campbell also wrote the novelization of Raiders of the Lost Ark & Dressed To Kill(with Brian de Palma)
(12/17/00)

Rebecca