Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford

"The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task". - Richard Ford

Richard Ford is one of America's great writers and I became a fan decades ago when I read his short story collection Rock Springs.  I loved that book, particularly the title story.  I then went on to read The Sportswriter.  It's the first novel in Richard Ford's acclaimed series centering around the life and times of Frank Bascombe.

I enjoyed The Sportswriter but I never bonded enough with Frank Bascombe to continue with the series. As I recall Frank can be very funny in an understated way but at his core there is a sadness to him and I wasn't in the right mood at the time.  But thanks to Richard Ford's moving and beautifully written memoir Between Them: Remembering My Parents (2019) I am reconnecting with an author I have long admired.  

Between Them tells the story of Richard's parents Parker and Edna Ford.  They grew up in Arkansas in the early part of the 20th century.  Their childhoods were not easy and so when they met each other it was a stroke of good luck.  Edna and Parker married young and Richard Ford writes:: 

"All along they wanted children. It was the normal thing. But that simply hadn’t happened. They weren’t sure why. Though it only made them closer—walled out the past and the future both. A suicide for a father and a severe Irish mother can close off a lot. Plus, my mother had had anything but an easy life before going to the nuns. The past for them wasn’t an accommodating site"

Parker and Edna accepted the fact that children were not in their future.  Parker was a traveling salesman throughout the 1930's and Edna travelled with him on his sales trips.  They lived in hotels, became friends with all kinds of people, ate at supper clubs and made a good living.  But most important they were together.  And then in 1944 fifteen years into their marriage Edna got pregnant and Richard Ford their only child was born

There is a sadness to this memoir in that the author does seem to feel that when it comes to his parents they loved him but he was a bit of a third wheel in their lives.  As many have commented the title of the memoir Between Them seems to indicate this.  But is Richard Ford right?  I thought so at the beginning of the book but by the end of this memoir (which is not very long) I wasn't so sure.  

I say this because Between Them is written in two parts.  The first part of the book is Richard Ford's tribute to his father, Parker Ford, and was written recently in 2017.  This section has a more distant quality because Parker Ford died in 1960 from heart failure when Richard was sixteen.  And before his death Richard didn't really know his father well.  Parker was away alot as a traveling salesman and when he came home he didn't communicate his feelings that much.  And we can only imagine the effect on Parker that his own father's suicide when he was a young boy must have had on him.

Part Two is Ford's tribute to his mother and was written in 1981 shortly after her death from cancer.  Edna Ford lived twenty years after her husband.  She never fully recovered from Parker's death but she got on with life.  Edna had a job working in an ER which she liked, made friends, went out to dinner.  She was a big fan of The Dodgers and Richard and his wife Kristina took Edna on trips, visited, had her over and took her to baseball games.  And Edna cared about her son Richard.  As the author tells us, Edna would sometimes pull him aside and ask: 

"Richard, are you happy?” And when I told her I was, she would say in a warning voice, “You must be happy. That’s so important.” Not that she was unhappy, but just that she knew whereof she spoke.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford is a great memoir, 5 stars.  And thank you to Sam at Book Chase (bookchase.blogspot.com) for his very fine review last year alerting me to this book.  It had been my plan for many years to return to reading Richard Ford and Sam's review gave me the push I needed.  And now it's time to dust off my copy of the Sportswriter and give Frank Bascombe another try.