Between Them: Remembering My Parents

Richard Ford has won The Pulitzer, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Asturias Award for Literature in Spain, among others. What is it about his work that appeals to the judges?

I think it is the deliberate, flat ordinariness of his prose. Ford does not go in for any showing off, which is a relief, and the result is a kind of quiet poetry.

In this loving memoir of his parents, ordinariness is the chief virtue. Ford’s father, Parker, was a travelling salesman for starch, a job he kept from 1938 ‘until he died’. Parker peddled his wares in the rural south, driving endlessly in a hot Oldsmobile across Louisiana and Alabama. ‘He’d found a thing he could do. Sell. Be liked. Make friends.’

Edna accompanied Parker on the road, and it was 1944, 15 years after they married, before Richard appeared – Parker was 38 and Edna was 33. There were to be no other children.

The future writer was a watchful only child, given to sulks and moods

and always aware that in some measure he had come between his parents, divided them somehow, spoiled their tranquillity.

Not that anyone discussed such matters. Ford says that in his parents’ world there was no interest in being reflective. Nevertheless, Parker and Edna were exactly the kind of quiet and diligent Americans who made the country great.

Ford brilliantly evokes the mid 20th-century scene: the music on car radios, ceiling fans, and breakfasts in hotel coffee shops.

Parker died in 1960 while Edna moved to Mississippi, and found fulfilment working as a hospital receptionist.

She died of breast cancer in 1981, never understanding what her son was up to as a writer.

‘When are you going to get a job and get started?’ she’d enquire. Yet out of ordinary beginnings Ford has created books that are extraordinary.