Somebody's Daughter

April 15, 2021
A potent coming-of-age memoir from a popular podcaster and BuzzFeed host. Growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with an incarcerated father and a dangerously overburdened mother forced the author to develop effective pain management skills. In a book that shares a similar spirit with Tara Westover's Educated, Ford tells the story of uniquely difficult circumstances with profound insight and detail about the tumults of childhood. "I seemed to have infinite patience for children," she writes. "Unlike some adults, I never quit remembering what it was like to be one. Their small plights were familiar to me, as were their big feelings." Readers may also see a connection to Tayari Jones' novel An American Marriage (2018), as both deal with the effect of a long prison sentence on a Black family, albeit from different angles. Ford begins her memoir with a letter from her father that reads, in part, "Ashley, don't take this the wrong way but come next year, I will have been incarcerated for twenty years, which means the letter that you wrote me was the first letter that you have written me in almost twenty years." In the next chapter, a few years later, the author learns that her father is getting out of prison. Because she was so young when he was incarcerated, her feelings about him were based mainly on the adoring letters she received over the years. Her father's unshakeable belief in her became her inner refuge from the tension, rage, and violence that dogged her childhood. As a child, she did not know what his crime was--and neither will readers for many chapters. Ford creates fully three-dimensional portraits of her mother, grandmother, and other key players, using a child's-eye view to show us their failings and the calculations, negotiations, and survival tactics she developed in response to them. Sure to be one of the best memoirs of 2021.

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Starred review from April 26, 2021
Journalist Ford debuts with a blistering yet tender account of growing up with an incarcerated father. She retraces her childhood in 1990s Fort Wayne, Ind., where she lived in a family anchored by her weary mother, whose anger bubbled over frequently, and a judgmental but loving grandmother. Felt throughout is the shadowy presence of her father, who was serving a 24-year sentence for rape. The moving narrative unfolds with tales of childhood misadventures with her younger brother, frequent library visits, and days spent anywhere but home: “I told myself being away was the only way we were going to make it out.” Ford writes vividly of having to weather her mother’s rage (which “drained the light from her eyes”) and rotating cast of boyfriends, while navigating her own sense of shame and abandonment as a teenager fighting to be “loved ferociously and completely” in a series of painful relationships. Though she rarely visited her father in prison, he wrote to her often, and “his letters were clues to where I’d come from.” When they finally reconnected before his release, Ford describes their tearful reunion and reconciliation with devastating clarity. “Somewhere, in the center of it all, was my father’s favorite girl.” This remarkable, heart-wrenching story of loss, hardship, and self-acceptance astounds.