Ashley C. Ford’s father wrote her a letter from the prison he’d spent much of her childhood in. And that letter, reprinted on the first page of the memoir, with it’s shame and love, humility and grief, sets the tone for this remarkable memoir.

“I am going to survive prison,” he writes. “I am going to create a beautiful life for myself. I’m going to show you and your brother how much I love you with every breath I take.”

To Ford, her father is a nearly unrecognizable person in family photographs, an idealized parent her mother won’t speak ill of, and an absent enigma onto which she projects all of the qualities missing in the way she’s being raised.

Much of the narrative focuses on her mother, volatile and sometimes abusive, loving and frighteningly unpredictable. Ford writes: “My mother’s rage drained the light from her eyes and she became unrecognizable to me. There was Mama, the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire… And then there was Mother who showed up in her place.”

What’s unusual about Ford’s memory as a child is how clearly she noticed and understood her mother. Ford says there were times she knew her mother came to a “fork in the road” and chose the path of fury and cruelty.  

She told me that she wanted to be “fair” to her mother.

She is also remarkably observant about her own reaction when her grandmother lets slip one day on a trip to the mall the reason that her father is in prison. Ford knows she is probably too young and too unprepared for how devastating this news is, but she is careful to conceal that from her grandmother, not wanting to appear too young to handle it.

Eventually she’ll write about all of it with the advice of her father urging her on: “When you write about you and me,” he tells her, “just tell the truth. Your truth.”

My Thread Must-Read is Ashley C. Ford’s debut memoir, “Somebody’s Daughter.” To find my candid and wide-ranging conversation with Ford, check out my podcast stream. It aired on July 8.

Next time? A book that argues — pretty persuasively — for less, not more.