Lewis Jones

Three for the road

He tells of the ordinary lives of Parker and Edna, hardworking people from the American south

issue 17 June 2017

One of the great challenges in life, writes Richard Ford in Between Them, ‘is to know our parents fully — assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing and it is physically possible’.

Leaving aside the question of whether we can ever know anyone fully, Ford’s knowledge of his parents, Parker and Edna, was limited. They did not survive long enough, or at least his father didn’t. Soon after Ford’s 16th birthday, his father ‘came awake in his bed on a Saturday morning and died’, aged 55, of a heart attack, as Richard administered CPR.

Nor were they particularly worth knowing, whatever that means; his description of them as ‘country people and insufficiently educated’ gives some idea. They were ‘ordinary’, the sort of people who feature in Ford’s novels.

So he did not know his parents as well as he might have wished, and this book, his first work of non-fiction, is his attempt to know them better.

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