First posted February 2000 - by Dave Read
Campbell Armstrong and I got to know each other in the early 1970s at Oswego (NY) State, where he was a young creative writing teacher and I was an older student.  He was a recent arriver from England, I was just returning to school after bumming around the country.   We became 
drinking buddies, while our wives became friends and co-founders of a food co-op and a babysitting co-op.

By the middle of that decade, he’d gone off to teach at Arizona State, I’d gone to graduate school and we lost touch with each other.  I’d hear about him from time to time through mutual friends and followed his career by reading most of his novels.  By some quirk of fate, we struck up an email correspondence (from his home in Ireland) around the time of his first wife's death early in 1998. 

Back in the 70s, I interviewed Armstrong for a journalism class.  By then, he'd written two novels, one called "Deaths Head," and I made a wisecrack like, "Death said what?"  Nineteen novels and one memoir later the question recurs, but not as a joke.  There were innumerable deaths in the novels that preceded the memoir, and it was occasioned by a real one.  Asked for the novels' estimated death toll, he wrote: 

 “Well, hard to say - I once blew up a London tube with more than a hundred people on it ( “Heat”), it was all just to get one man.  Nasty.  The next novel, set in Glasgow, has only three or four.  Mild.  I’m changing, man.” 

Published this month, the memoir is Armstrong’s fulfillment of a promise he made to his ex-wife while she lay dying early in 1998.  “Tell this story, of Barbara and me, how we found each other.” said Eileen.  She wanted him to tell the story of how Barbara, adopted at birth 42 years earlier, finally located her mother Eileen, but not until both were sick with cancer.

And so he has.  Thirty years writing fiction made Armstrong a good man to tell an improbable story full of twists and turns, a disparate cast of characters, with action taking place over the course of several decades on two continents.  That, and something else, enabled him to write this book, which reveals the ineffable beauty of daily life as lived by a small family and a few friends who know death is not far away. 

Armstrong said that he thinks of Eileen daily.  “I lost a great friend, and we’ll never meet again in all the rest of history.  I don’t believe in an afterlife where we meet up for a kegger.  It would be nice if there was one.” 

Later on he said, “I think of the millions of little dramas that go on every day, the goodbyes, the last goodbyes, the way we can help each other die - I am quite afraid of dying, I guess if I’d been told about being born, I’d have been quite afraid of entering the world too.  Entering and leaving...” 

Recalling one of our last conversations in the 70s, when Armstrong told me he had taken his first hit of acid, I asked if he thought psychedelics had played a role in his parturition as a writer. 

"I took it only thrice and got kind of weird, it wasn't for me.  After a time though, I observed all drugs made me paranoid, cocaine most of all.  Jaw-numbing menace, weird dread...all of it manufactured in the head. 

"Acid played no role in my writing.  Honestly so.  Cocaine maybe, in the sense it left me on handshaking terms with utter paranoia, and some weirdass gun-toting characters as well (these ones were real...I think). 

"I am not paranoid in Ireland:  if I am it's at a normal level.  My favorite drug of choice would probably be a sleeping-pill.  Tells you where I'm at."