Between Them: Remembering My Parents was published by Ecco in 2017. The book consists of two linked essays: “My Mother, in Memory” (written in 1987, revised for this volume) and “By the Book” (written for this volume, about his father Parker). Together they compose Ford’s most personal work — a reckoning with the two people who shaped him and whom he can never fully know.
Parker Ford was a traveling salesman for a starch company, driving through the Deep South selling to laundries and commercial operations. He died of a heart attack at fifty-three, when Richard was sixteen. Edna Ford survived her husband by decades, living alone, working, maintaining her independence until she could not. Ford writes about both with a combination of love and bewilderment: he is their only child, he carries everything they were, and yet he cannot reach them — memory is insufficient, understanding always partial.
The prose is Ford’s most intimate: stripped of the ironic distance that characterizes Frank Bascombe’s voice, vulnerable in a way his fiction never permits. He writes about his father’s death with the same precision he brings to fictional violence — the specific details (the hospital, the moment, his own sixteen-year-old incomprehension) rendered without melodrama. The book argues implicitly that parents remain unknowable — that the gap between what we remember and what they were is unbridgeable — and that love persists across that gap regardless.
Collecting Between Them
First edition (Ecco/HarperCollins, New York, 2017): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Signed: $30–$60
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
A Son’s Memoir
Between Them (2017) is Ford’s memoir of his parents — Parker Carrol Ford, a traveling salesman for a starch company, and Edna Akin Ford, who raised Richard largely alone while his father was on the road. The first half, about his mother, was written in the 1980s and published separately; the second half, about his father, was written thirty years later. The disparity is telling — Ford barely knew his father, who died when Richard was sixteen. The memoir is slim, precise, and moving, a quiet masterpiece of filial love and honest reckoning with the limits of memory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this autobiographical Ford? It is the only sustained non-fiction personal memoir Ford has published, and it illuminates the autobiographical threads running through all his fiction, particularly the absent or inadequate fathers and the strong, resilient mothers.