Ashley C. Ford wants to own her own story — father included
Ashley C. Ford, appearing at the American Writers Festival on May 15 (in conversation with Chicago poet and scholar Eve Ewing), is pure voice, bright, fun to read, chatty. But that description doesn’t do justice to her writing, which carries you into dramas with unsuspecting force. Ford is a podcast host and journalist, and last year, her memoir, “Somebody’s Daughter,” landed her on bestseller lists and best-ofyear lists. It tells the story of how Ford — a survivor of rape whose own father was in jail for rape — also became pure resilience.
Q: You have such a conversational, casual writing style, was it hard writing solely, painfully, about yourself? A:
That’s why it took so long. It took 10 years. I started in college. Parts existed in essay form for nonfiction class, and then I did something I did not expect to do and tried to turn it into something bigger. Which took 10 years to figure out how to survive and write about yourself, now in your 30s. Writing about yourself is already hard and definitely hard when you come from a marginalized community where you’re supposed to be mistrustful about the masses knowing too much about you and your home. I had
to confront the fact that I was allowed to own my own story. I was raised that way. I was raised with the idea that telling the truth of how someone harmed you could be betrayal.
Q: In the book, you don’t reveal your father’s crimes for a while, which mirrors your life. You didn’t know what he did until you were a teenager. Had you asked? A:
Oh, I asked, but the thing about my family structure and the adults I was around, if I asked a question nobody wanted to answer, not only did they not want to discuss it, I would be in trouble. Then I was a troublemaker for even thinking about that. To protect myself I tried to do it when it was extremely safe, which requires someone else to bring it up first. I also couldn’t lie to myself about the fact this didn’t seem to be working the way they thought — that if they didn’t bring it up, it went away. No, it never went away.
Q: Your father is still in jail. Did you bring him the book? A:
I did. He’s read it. It was, for him, like getting the letters I never wrote. It gave him a chance to know me. But it was hard for him, and it took a while for him to get through.
Q: The title,“Somebody’s Daughter,” could mean a lot of people in your family, but I also wonder if it’s a reference to yourself, that you were your own guardian? A:
I think so, yes. The child version of me is still inside me, and she has things she’s working through and I am her guardian and my job is to make a safe space in a way that she deserves. Emotionally, I absolutely parented myself. A lot of the privileges of childhood stopped being afforded to me well before I stopped being a child.