Between Them by Richard Ford: book review

Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2017) is set in America from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Richard Ford wrote his first memoir in 1981, and this is his second one 40 years later, and 55 years after his father’s death. This memoir is written in two parts: the first part is called Gone, Remembering My Father, and the second part is called My Mother, In Memory.

Parker Ford and Edna Akin met and married in 1928, taking to the road together due to Parker’s job as a travelling salesman, selling laundry starch. To everyone’s surprise, Edna becomes pregnant 15 years later, and in 1944 their only son Richard is born when Parker is 38 and Edna is 33. Their lives change dramatically – they need to find a place to live.

The Fords move to Jackson, Mississippi. Parker returns to his travelling sales job: gone Monday, home Friday. In essence, Edna raises her son.

When Richard’s father returns home on weekends, he is coming home to Edna, for it is her that he loves. For Richard, ‘life was neither worse nor better.’ Richard is ‘disruptive and undisciplined’ in school, gets poor grades, and is ‘wilful’ by the age of ten.

At 16, Richard’s father dies at the age of 55, and Edna’s life changes dramatically again. Now, it really is just Edna and Richard, mother and son.

This memoir is not only about mid-20^th-century American life, it is about life as a ‘third wheel’ – the life of a sole, late child, with a distant father and a mother who was better at being a wife. Life without Parker, her partner, her husband, her everything, was empty – at times she even forgot she had a son.

This memoir is honestly-told, about the poignant and intimate love between his parents, between them, that virtually excluded everyone else. There is so much about his father that he never knew, not when he was growing up, and not now when writing the memoir. Gaps in facts, gaps in memory, gaps in love. This memoir is well-worth a read.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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