JM: I could never imagine doing something like this because, beyond that brutalness of exposing yourself, there’s also an honesty that potentially could be hurtful to others, to parents, siblings, old lovers. We always want to believe that people, ultimately, think mostly good of us. Or, at the very least, we want them to lie if they can’t say anything nice. Have you spoken to anyone in the book after the fact, now that it’s out? Has there been any weirdness?

KS: There’s not much weirdness…yet. I’m still waiting for my mom to give me her thoughts. But my personal feelings on it is that most of these things happened twenty years or more ago. People forgive or forget in that time span, I hope. I got a couple of messages from old girlfriends about the book. Erin, who I wrote about in a couple of chapters, said: “I don’t remember doing some of those awful things, but they sound true. I was 19 after all.” To be fair, I tried to own up to my own dumb behavior more than anyone else. I think that’s really the way to do a memoir. You can’t make yourself the victim and you can’t pretend to be a hero.

~ Kevin Sampsell interviewed at JMWW