“Between Them: Remembering My Parents” by Richard Ford

Today would have been my parents’ 55th wedding anniversary, and yet it remains my mother’s birthday, too. So there is still reason to celebrate despite this now bittersweet date. I wrote two published books, and literally hundreds of speeches, newspaper and magazine articles with my dad. I used to think he wouldn’t speak to me unless I had a pen in my hand. I am now writing a memoir with my mom about her extraordinary life. Writing about and with my parents is one of the ways I am able to connect with them the best. “Between Them: Remembering My Parents” is Richard Ford’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about his own mother and father. His mother Edna married his father Parker, a traveling salesman, in 1928. However, she didn’t give birth to Richard until 1944. He details their lives on the road, traveling through the south together, until Edna settled down to raise her new baby boy. This slender yet powerful book is composed of only two short stories, written 30 years apart. Ford wrote the first part recently and it is about his dad who died in 1960 when the author was just 16. He wrote the second part, about his mother immediately after she died in 1981. His father died quickly from a sudden heart attack while his mother died slowly of cancer. Through the two short stories he seeks to understand what their lives were like before they had him, and after welcoming him into the world. Ford, well known for his fiction, proves that he has the gift of being a non-fiction writer as well. When author Cheryl Strayed reviewed this book for “The New York Times” last year, she called it  “A remarkable story about two unremarkable people we would never have know, but for him. Which he couldn’t have written, but for them. “ Happy Birthday to Barbara Sue Wells. To purchase this book on Amazon click here.