Richard Ford is the only child of older parents. Before he was born, his parents spent years driving around the South of the US for his father’s job, selling industrial quantities of starch. After his birth, he and his mother would remain home in Jackson, his father returning on weekends. Then, in 1960 when Ford was 16, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. In this brilliant two-part memoir, Ford suggests that he would never have become a writer if he hadn’t been left with the feeling that by arriving late he’d interrupted a happy and good narrative between his parents, and if he hadn’t been forced into a kind of freedom and early adulthood by his father’s death. And he’s a superb writer, having won – among other prizes – a Pulitzer for Independence Day. His mother, on the other hand, would never again be easily happy.

Between Them is a quiet, meditative work. Long-time readers of Ford and newcomers alike will devour it in an afternoon for the personal and familial insights, but also for the way we see those details and moments that have been warped and scrambled in, say, the 1987 stand-out story collection Rock Springs and the 1990 novella Wildlife, which I would say is his most perfect work. (Wildlife, though fiction, could almost be read, along with the two parts of this memoir, as the first part of Ford’s literary search for his parents and his childhood.) We feel Ford continue to struggle over making sense of particular events, and against the shortcomings of memory, and of communication. There are so many things he never asked and couldn’t. In Between Them, he writes that understanding one’s parents is a crucial step in understanding the world. And it’s not easy, as we have countless contradictory snapshots of them at different ages, theirs and ours. I’m not sure I agree, but I do find that attempts at understanding make for mystifying, engrossing and moving books, such as this one.

Oliver Driscoll