Review: "Between Them" by Richard Ford

This is the second time this year that I have read a nonfiction book by an author whose extensive collection of novels and short stories that have always failed to impress me despite their critical appreciation. First, it was Benjamin Percy’s excellent Thrill Me, a collection of essays on the craft of writing, and now it is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford’s first foray into nonfiction with his new book, the memoir Between Them. Of the three books I have read by Ford, the first two novels in the Frank Bascombe, The Sportswriter and Independence Day which won him the aforementioned award and his latest novel Canada, noon of them have been what I would call homeruns (although Independence Day has probably my favorite book blurb which uses the baseball metaphor), and I particularly didn’t care for Canada, so I picked this book up with a little trepidation, but with my experience earlier this with Percy’s nonfiction book cozily stored in my mind. And I am glad to say that my sense were correct because this little 175 page book is utterly fantastic and the one of my favorite memoirs to date. In chronicling the lives of his parents, separate from him, Ford has crafted an elegiac and meditative ode to the ephemeral nature of life and what is left when we are gone. Broken up into two sections, which ford states in the afterword were written over 30 years apart, each section chronicles, or tries to chronicle the lives of the two people who created Ford. It is a very unsentimental and humble look at the lives of two people he loved dearly and who parted from this world, to quote him, before they were ready. There are no grand gestures in this book: no revelations, no real heroics from either parent, each of whom had flaws and qualities that Ford ruminates on in delightful, dreamlike prose that somehow worked here in this small book but not his others. We learn about his father, Parker Ford, about his own father who committed suicide when he lost the family farm, about his courtship of Ford’s mother, his employment at a starch company, the birth of Richard, their only son and his eventual death in 1960 when ford was only 20 years old. The next section, the longer of the two gives us details of Ford’s mother. Edna Akin, six years younger than Parker. We learn of her strange upbringing with her mother and stepfather, who included a forceful stay at a convent, her life with Parker and her life without Parker and her eventual death from cancer in 1981. Each section leaves you feeling gutted, especially the first one, as someone whose own father died before I turned 20. It stares fearlessly into life’s darker corners and handles harsh truths with delicate hand: death, grief and longing are inescapable and part of life, and even at 73 years old, older than both his parents were when they died, Ford still thinks about them. This is a very sad book, but it’s greatness, its ease and its heartfelt wisdom make it worth your while to check out.

Rating: 5/5