Richard Ford has a curious way of keeping story ideas fresh. He puts the pages on ice — literally.
The award-winning novelist is known for storing manuscripts in the freezer, a safety measure learned from his mother, who grew up fearing house fires. Over two decades, Ford added more than 300 notes to a certain frozen envelope, which eventually became the novel "Canada," one of 2012's most celebrated titles.
Ford’s latest book seems to have benefited from a similar, yet even longer, fermentation period. “Between Them: Remembering My Parents,” his first full-length nonfiction work, is a tender, multifaceted memoir that defies expectations.
The first half recalls the moods and ambitions of Parker Carrol, the author’s father who died of a sudden heart attack in 1960. Ford contemplates his unconventional mother, Edna, and the unanticipated ways loss changed both their lives in the book’s emotional second half.
The twist: Ford wrote the latter essay in 1981, shortly after his mother succumbed to cancer. The more detailed biography of his father and grandparents came about recently.
Structurally, placing the “older” material later in the book seems like a risky approach, as does the author’s choice to leave in minor inconsistencies between the two narratives. Ford makes a compelling case for the framework in the postscript, explaining that memories of his father required reaching deeper into the past, while his mother’s life came closer to the present.
Though the chronology overlaps in some repeated anecdotes and genealogies, the two pieces offer distinct and complementary deliberations on family, intimacy and impermanence.
In a dozen previous novels and story collections, Ford has delivered a commanding, wide-reaching survey of post-war America, most notably via his Frank Bascombe books, which began with "The Sportswriter" in 1985. Its sequel, "Independence Day," won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award.
“Between Them” suggests that the author’s wanderlust and talent for precise observation may be rooted in the thousands of miles he covered with his traveling salesman dad, who peddled laundry starch from Texas to Tennessee. Ford recalls Parker as a “soft, heavy-seeming, smiling” giant prone to anger and private torments, the youngest child of “a dandified” Arkansas farmer who’d poisoned himself over bad investments.
Parker was working as a grocer when he met 17-year-old Edna Akin, a sharp-witted, vivacious girl “from the sticks — worse than the country.” After they married, Edna joined her new husband as he toured cooking classes in church basements and gymnasiums across the South.
Childless for their first 15 years together, the nomadic couple decided almost arbitrarily to settle in Jackson, Miss., once Richard was born in 1944.
Ford claims he wanted to write only about what he “knew factually” (“My parents were, after all, not made of words,” he notes.), but the memoir’s forceful, introspective narrator isn’t so easily shackled. Attempts to make sense of a parent defined by absence — Parker traveled constantly for work — tend to result in intriguing but ephemeral speculations.
His dad “seemed to be from another place and another time far away,” Ford observes, a sensation magnified by the distance of years. “Memory has pushed him further and further away until I ‘see’ him — in those early days — as a large, smiling man standing on the other side of a barrier made of air, looking at me, possibly looking for me, recognizing me as his son but never coming quite close enough for me to touch.”
In another troubling passage, he wonders if his courteous, shy father might have been depressed — a term the salesman would not have recognized. Regardless, the question speaks to the unknowability of others’ interior lives.
Parker’s first heart attack at age 43 marks the start of the final chapter of his life, years characterized by growing detachment between parent and child. “He was not a stranger, but he was like a stranger, and while it was foregone that he loved me, it’s possible he looked upon me the way I looked upon him.” Ford’s tense retelling of the heart attack that killed his dad brings the book’s opening essay to an unforgettable finish.
When Edna assumes the spotlight, the memoir sputters for several pages, revisiting anecdotes and characters fleshed out in earlier passages. Occasional gaps in facts and missing details demonstrate the slippery nature of autobiography, the challenges of assembling handed-down stories and hazy memories.
Ford ponders such points at length: “(T)he chore for the memoir writer is to compose a shape and an economy that gives faithful, reliable, if sometimes drastic, coherence to the many unequal things any life contains. As I have already, repeatedly said, humans comprise much more than anyone can tell about them.”
Which may be true, but the essay’s portrait of Edna’s twilight years still tells plenty. Ford explores the unusual camaraderie they developed after his father died. “We just somehow knew how we were supposed to act as widowed mother and only teenage son, and took self-conscious pleasure in acting that way. … We were, as stated, partners in my messes and hers.”
This leads to unexpected hilarity when Edna starts dating again. Later, his mother’s struggle with cancer leads to startling epiphanies about aging, compassion and self-awareness.
“One of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible. The more we see our parents fully, after all, see them as the world does, the better our chances to see the world as it is.”
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NONFICTION
‘Between Them: Remembering My Parents’
By Richard Ford
Ecco
$26, 192 pages
About the Author
