Between Them: Remembering My Parents

by Richard Ford

Overview

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love

How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty Catholic-school girl with a difficult past; and Parker, a sweet-natured, soft-spoken traveling salesman—were rural Arkansans born at the turn of the twentieth century. Married in 1928, they lived “alone together” on the road, traveling throughout the South. Eventually they had one child, born late, in 1944.

For Ford, the questions of what his parents dreamed of, how they loved each other and loved him become a striking portrait of American life in the mid-century. Between Them is his vivid image of where his life began and where his parents’ lives found their greatest satisfaction.

Bringing his celebrated candor, wit, and intelligence to this most intimate and mysterious of landscapes—our parents’ lives—the award-winning storyteller and creator of the iconic Frank Bascombe delivers an unforgettable exploration of memory, intimacy, and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062661890
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.

Date of Birth:

February 16, 1944

Place of Birth:

Jackson, Mississippi

Education:

B.A., Michigan State University, 1966; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, 1970

Editorial Reviews

Affection and insightful...deep, attentive...In this slim beauty of a memoir, [Ford] has given us—the same way he has given us many times in his fiction—a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him.

Cheryl Strayed

In this beautiful and tender memoir, Ford seems to see all of the important details. He makes his readers grateful that he shared them.

Portland Press Herald

A masterful distillation of sensuous description, psychological intricacy, social insights, and a keen sense of place. Ford’s reflections are bright with wit, edgy with candor, and lustrous with extraordinary poignancy and love.

BookPage

[A]n honest recording of two ‘wonderful’ if ordinary parents...Ford notes how the act of writing a memoir, of having the last word, discloses his own shortcomings, then and now...‘It is merely how life is,’ the ultimate truth to which this affecting book is witness.

Boston Globe

Between Them is driven by the author's curiosity about who his parents were—both who they seemed to him to be in their lives and who, in retrospect, he imagines they might have been beyond his view. It's through this innate desire to know, paired with Ford's exceptional abilities as a prose craftsman, that these two ordinary people are made vital and vivid to us on the page. His depictions and examinations of his parents before and after he was born—their mannerisms and bearings, their wounds and silences, their squabbles and pleasures—offer a master class in character development and narrative economy…There's a vulnerability that I've not observed in Ford's work before, a tender surrender to the search. What makes this book so moving is, in part, Ford's glorious engagement with the unknowable that we, paradoxically, come to memoir for…It has often been said that to pay attention is the greatest act of love, and Ford has paid masterly attention in Between Them. But he has also done more. In this slim beauty of a memoir, he has given us—the same way he has given us many times in his fiction—a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him. Which he couldn't have written, but for them.

The New York Times Book Review - Cheryl Strayed

★ 02/20/2017
Ford vividly and gracefully preserves his memories of parents, his life “between them,” and the small Southern towns that provided the limits and the possibilities of their lives. His parents—traveling salesman father Parker, and housewife mother Edna—were married in 1928; and though they wanted a child, they didn’t need one to be “fully formed,” according to Ford, who was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1944. One section of the book is devoted to Ford’s father, Parker; Ford completed it in 2015, nearly 55 years after Parker’s death. Ford wrote the section about his mother, Edna, shortly after her death in 1981. When his father took a job selling laundry starch for the Faultless Company, he traveled through much of the South, and he and Edna lived on the road, in hotels in Memphis; New Orleans; and Pensacola, Fla.. Before Ford started school, he often accompanied them, but as he grew older, he became increasingly aware of his father’s absences, determining that “permanence was something you fashioned.” Following Parker’s death from a heart attack when Ford was 16, Edna took a series of jobs and became brisk and businesslike. Every page of this little remembrance teems with Ford’s luxuriant prose, his moving and tender longing for his parents, and his affecting and intimate portrait of two people simply living life as best they can as their world changes around them. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Affection and insightful...deep, attentive...In this slim beauty of a memoir, [Ford] has given us—the same way he has given us many times in his fiction—a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him.” — Cheryl Strayed, New York Times Book Review

“[A]n honest recording of two ‘wonderful’ if ordinary parents...Ford notes how the act of writing a memoir, of having the last word, discloses his own shortcomings, then and now...‘It is merely how life is,’ the ultimate truth to which this affecting book is witness.” — Boston Globe

“In this beautiful and tender memoir, Ford seems to see all of the important details. He makes his readers grateful that he shared them.” — Portland Press Herald

“By any standards, this is a singular volume, as peculiarly personal as it is slim…a subtle, careful testament to devotion and a son’s love for his parents.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Every page of this little remembrance teems with Ford’s luxuriant prose, his moving and tender longing for his parents, and his affecting and intimate portrait of two people simply living life as best they can.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A masterful distillation of sensuous description, psychological intricacy, social insights, and a keen sense of place. Ford’s reflections are bright with wit, edgy with candor, and lustrous with extraordinary poignancy and love.” — BookPage

From the Publisher

[A] deeply felt and magnificently imagined work…With Canada, Ford has given us his deepest exploration yet of weakness and betrayal set amid a boy’s coming of age. It is a memorable novel, suffused with love, sorrow and regret.

Austin American-Statesman

While we’ve seen versions of Ford’s parents in his stories and novels, to have them here in their own right is thrilling, heartbreaking and ultimately enlivening.

Toronto Star

…you don’t read the Bascombe books for plot. You read them for Ford’s gleaming sentences, which in Let Me Be Frank are as burnished as ever, and for the quality of Frank’s questing intelligence, which persists in sensing what’s coming.

USA Today

Elegant prose . . . unassuming but sweetly profound phraseology. . . . The most moving thing he’s written.

The Globe and Mail

[Canada]confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America… his most elegiac and profound book…

Washington Post

[A] novel about big truths told by a writer with clear vision…solid, satisfying craftsmanship. This is a Richard Ford novel in the tradition of his earlier work. It also is a coming-of-age story, and a story about the discovery of identity.

Washington Independent Review of Books

[Subtle] stories told with wit and grace… Ford has established himself as one of contemporary America’s most interesting storytellers. Let Me be Frank with You does nothing to diminish this well-deserved reputation.

New York Journal of Books

[Canada]confirms his position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America… his most elegiac and profound book…

Washington Post

…you don’t read the Bascombe books for plot. You read them for Ford’s gleaming sentences, which in Let Me Be Frank are as burnished as ever, and for the quality of Frank’s questing intelligence, which persists in sensing what’s coming.

USA Today

12/01/2016
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ford turns to nonfiction but remains in storytelling mode as he recalls his freewheeling parents, who rather unconventionally lived out of hotels during the Depression as Ford's father, Parker, traveled about the South selling laundry starch. Throughout, Ford considers how well we can really know others, even those we deeply love. With a 200,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford’s remembrance of growing up in the 1950s is at times insightful, enlightening, and emotionally evocative, especially as performed by narrator Christian Baskous. Ford gives his mother credit for honing his narrative voice. He spent most of his years with her, as his father, a traveling salesman, died in his arms when he was 16. Baskous uses his dulcet voice and practiced pacing most effectively in scenes in which Ford describes living with his colorful grandfather, the manager of a bustling hotel in Little Rock, prime territory for a young storyteller in search of material. Fans of the the iconic character Frank Bascombe (THE SPORTSWRITER) may find real-life connections between the character and the artist in this examination of recollection, intimacy, and love. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

MAY 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-03-07
The Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer tells what he knows of the marriage of his loving parents—and what he can never know, as the only child who came between them.This is a memoir that seems to have been written more for Ford (Let Me Be Frank with You, 2014, etc.) than for his readers, and it reveals as much about the writer as it does about his parents. Neither of these observations implies fault, only that the renowned novelist recognizes how the selection of detail and the limitations of memory inform a narrative and how the writer's craft inevitably makes the results as much about the writer (and his craft) as his subject. By any standards, this is a singular volume, as peculiarly personal as it is slim. There are two sections, one devoted to each parent: "Gone: Remembering My Father" and "My Mother, In Memory." The second was written three decades before the first, shortly after his mother's death. Ford's father had died much earlier, leaving his mother alone in the world to raise the son she loved, but not in the way she had loved his father. "He was her protector, but she was his," writes the author. "If it meant that I was further from the middle of things, I have lived my entire life thinking this is the proper way to be a family." There is some duplication in the material, the few incidents that seemed so significant in the life of each of his parents, recollected separately across a gap of three decades. There is also conjecture, as Ford imagines the lives of each before they met each other—and their life together before they had the child who would change everything. "For all this to be a blissful life," writes the author, "love is certainly required, and a willingness—on my part—to fill some things in and deflect others." A subtle, careful testament to devotion and a son's love for his parents.

Kirkus Reviews