Cheryl Strayed on Richard Ford’s Masterly Memoir of His Parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/books/review/richard-ford-between-them.html

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BETWEEN THEMRemembering My ParentsBy Richard FordIllustrated. 179 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.

There are two sentences in William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” that I’ve returned to often in the 20-some years since I first read them: “It takes two people to make you and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.” I’ve often puzzled over why those sentences have repeatedly reeled me back to them. They aren’t all that profound. They don’t say anything surprising or new. Usually, when I take my aged copy of the book from my shelves and turn to Page 39 to find those lines once more, I’m disappointed. In my memory of them they’re more piercing than they turn out to be on the page, where they state only what’s plainly true: We are born of two and we die alone.

And yet, of course — and this I’ve always known, even in my puzzlement and disappointment — what draws me back to them is a truth that sits beneath the surface of the twin, universal facts of our beginnings and endings: the unequivocal triad of mother-father-self. Whether that triad is sturdy or broken, bonded by biology, affection or both, it’s one that most of us must reckon with, in some shifting fashion, all of our lives.

I pondered Faulkner’s lines again recently, as I lay awake at 1 a.m. thinking about Richard Ford’s new memoir “Between Them: Remembering My Parents,” which I had finished the hour before. The book is composed of two discrete, novella-length memoirs that were written more than 30 years apart. Ford wrote the first, about his father, Parker, a traveling salesman who died in 1960 when Ford was 16, recently; he wrote the second, about his independent, no-nonsense mother, Edna, shortly after her death in 1981. Together they form an illuminating portrait of a slightly unconventional white couple born in the early years of the 20th century. With a depth of perception that’s both affectionate and insightful, Ford tells the stories of his parents’ lives and deaths by turn, as they move from Arkansas to Mississippi, from near-poverty to the middle class, from 15 years of child-free marriage to the surprise of parenthood at an age that was then considered late in life, and from his father’s sudden, early death of a heart attack, to his mother’s widowhood and eventual death by cancer.

This book is about them, but it’s also about the boy they made and what he has come, 70-plus years on, to make of them. In showing his mother and father to us, Ford — an ordinary child, who grew up to become one of our most distinguished fiction writers — has, inevitably, shown a fair portion of himself.

A lot of that is done by way of Ford looking outward rather than inward. “Between Them” is driven by the author’s curiosity about who his parents were — both who they seemed to him to be in their lives and who, in retrospect, he imagines they might have been beyond his view. It’s through this innate desire to know, paired with Ford’s exceptional abilities as a prose craftsman, that these two ordinary people are made vital and vivid to us on the page. His depictions and examinations of his parents before and after he was born — their mannerisms and bearings, their wounds and silences, their squabbles and pleasures — offer a master class in character development and narrative economy, as in this passage, in which Ford describes his parents around the time of their first meeting:

“His large malleable, fleshy face was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one. The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes — my eyes. My mother must’ve noticed this when she met him — wherever she did. In Hot Springs or Little Rock, sometime before 1928. Noticed this and liked what she saw. A man who liked to be happy. She had never been exactly happy — only inexactly, with the nuns who taught her at St. Anne’s in Fort Smith, where her mother had put her to keep her out of the way.”

This is not a book that runs on the steam of what-happens-next, but rather on the contemplative, inquisitive force of Ford’s longing to finally see his parents, which inevitably has him looking back. “Mine has been a life of noticing and being a witness,” he writes in the final pages of the book, a claim that will come as no surprise to those who have admired the penetrating understanding of the nuances of human character evident in his fiction. But this noticing takes on a different shade in “Between Them.” There’s a vulnerability that I’ve not observed in Ford’s work before, a tender surrender to the search. What makes this book so moving is, in part, Ford’s glorious engagement with the unknowable that we, paradoxically, come to memoir for — it’s only in fiction, after all, that a writer has the luxury of omniscience, of being the god of the who, how, when, where, what and why.

There is no god in memoir. We all have a dazzling lack of authority about the inner lives of even the people with whom we are most intimate. In “Between Them,” Ford uses this to his advantage. His deep interrogation of the things he didn’t and couldn’t know about his parents runs alongside the fact that no one knew them better or remembers them as accurately as he did or does. Precisely in the passages that give way to this convergence of conjecture and knowledge, memory and supposition, Ford comes the closest to grasping most fully who his parents were. His deep, attentive, almost methodical wondering about them — in other words, the things that may or may not be actually true — bring the private realities of their existence most palpably to life. Of his father, out on the road selling laundry starch, a job that kept him away from home each week Monday morning through Friday evening, Ford writes:

“And how was it for him? Driving, driving alone? Sitting in those hotel rooms, in lobbies, reading a strange newspaper in the poor lamplight; taking a walk down a street in the evening, smoking? Eating supper with some man he knew off the road? Listening to the radio in the sweep and hum of an oscillating fan. Then turning in early to the noise of katydids and switch-yards, car doors closing and voices in the street laughing into another night. How was it being a father this way — having a wife, renting a house in a town where they knew almost no one and had no friends, coming home only on weekends, as if this were home?”

It has often been said that to pay attention is the greatest act of love, and Ford has paid masterly attention in “Between Them.” But he has also done more. In this slim beauty of a memoir, he has given us — the same way he has given us many times in his fiction — a remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would have never known, but for him. Which he couldn’t have written, but for them.