Title: Somebody’s Daughter*
Author: Ashley C. Ford
Rating: I don’t normally rate memoirs/autobiographies, because that feels like “rating” a person’s lived experience, but this book was incredible. Highly recommend.
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Favorite Quote: “My earliest memories are sunburnt Polaroids, frozen memories gone blurry at the edges and spotted all down the middle. Then, at four, the pictures become clearer and clearer, as do the voices within them.” Ford, Ashley. Somebody’s Daughter. Flatiron Books, 2021.
Review: Somebody’s Daughter follows Ford’s life, from early childhood to now, as she navigates a world where her father is incarcerated, her caregivers often perpetuate violence against her, and she is asked to navigate coming of age as a Black woman in America.
I don’t even know where to start with this memoir - there were so many parts of it I found powerful and listening to parts of it as an audiobook, hearing Ford’s story in her own voice, made the experience even more impactful.
I suppose I’ll start with the content portions I was most interested in/intrigued by. As a public defender, I often interact with folks who are incarcerated or at risk of being incarcerated. By extension, I also often interact with their families. And one of the topical aspects of this memoir that I absolutely loved, is how Ford wrote in a manner that humanized her father, and approached his situation with empathy and compassion. I became a public defender because I firmly believe that folks are not just the worst things they’ve done (or are accused of doing), and that everyone, regardless of accusations against them, are deserving of humane treatment (and vigorous representation in the criminal justice system). Ford reflects these values in her writing and in her complicated relationship with her father. She writes more than once that it is not her place to forgive him for what he’s done, but she loves him regardless and the way she writes about him makes that clear. I stopped for a moment, when I read the following line, because it so reflected what I long to read when I’m reading about incarcerated folks in the media: “To the world he was a bad man. To me, he was my dad who did a bad thing.” Ford, Ashley. Somebody’s Daughter. Flatiron Books, 2021. People may do bad things, but that certainly does not make them bad people. And to see this in a book, written by a person so closely entwined with someone accused of doing “bad things,” was by far one of the most moving parts of this book.
This memoir is also striking in the timeline it encomasses. It’s a relatively short book - my copy is 212 pages - and yet it successfully follows Ford from early childhood to modern day. While there were a few moments I got a bit lost in the timeline, for the most part, she covers this span of time without the reader feeling like large chunks of time are lost to its brevity. She writes about the moments in her life that most impacted her, and as the reader, we are just along for the ride.
I’ll get a bit more into this in the quote section, but, as usual with me, I was also absolutely entranced by the language of this memoir. It was novel-like in that aspect - telling the writer’s story, sure, but telling it lyrically. The moments of tension crescendoed, the moments of peace felt quiet and sedate. She echoed what she was experiencing - the feelings and the sensations - with the language she employed. Perhaps this is trite, but, she very much showed instead of told.
About that Quote: We all know by now that a well-written sentence is my absolute favorite thing about books. I will cry. I will laugh. I will feel whatever emotion it is the author wants me to feel if the sentence, at its base, is well-written and well-structured. And by golly, can Ashley Ford write that kind of sentence. I don’t know if I was so struck by this sentence because of my budding interest in photography, or because it so closely mirrored my own experience of memory - a collection of sights, sounds, and smells, rather than some sort of linear collection of events - but this sentence spoke to me. It’s placed relatively early in the book, but it’s one of those quotes I kept coming back to and that kept me reading.
TW for Somebody’s Daughter: SA, r*pe, child ab*use, violence, racism
Have you read Somebody’s Daughter? Share your thoughts below!
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