‘It’s not a bad thing to dedicate your life to those moments that heighten life’

Veteran American novelist Richard Ford found himself described in James Runcie’s introduction as “one of the finest sentence-writers in the world”. Now the author of the Frank Bascombe novels, and of other luminous works of fiction, has turned his attention to his own life with Between Them, a memoir of his parents.

His event at the Book Festival yesterday was much anticipated, and he will return to Charlotte Square today at 3:15pm to talk with Kirsty Wark about the state of his nation.

Invited by Runcie to “look under the bonnet” of his memoir, Ford’s reflections were as clear-eyed and finely crafted as his written prose.

Between Them is a short book which took 30 years to finish. He wrote about his mother, Edna, after her death in 1986, but it was only in his early 70s that he turned to his father, Parker, who died when he was 16, “re-finding, recovering, remembering when I didn’t know I remembered, but always saying only the things I know to be true”.

Parker Ford was a travelling salesman working the territory of the southern states, and he and Edna were married for 15 years before a surprise pregnancy in the summer of 1943 brought their only child, Richard, into the world. Ford described how the death of his father, who suffered a heart attack and died in his arms, helped set him on the path to becoming a writer. “That moment let me know that there are moments, and would be moments, which heighten life, and it’s not a bad thing to dedicate your life to these moments.”

With disarming honesty, he added: “If he had not died, he would have had his thumb on me. I would have ended up selling starch or being in the military, more than likely I would not have gone to college.

“When my father died – in the minutes after – I felt a little freer.

“I knew that’s not how you’re supposed to feel, you’re supposed to feel very sad, and I did – but I could also feel something enlarging in me.”

Ford, a great poet of what Blake termed the “particulars” of life, a finder of the luminous in ordinary things, wanted to do for his parents what he has done for so many of his fictional character.

“My parents were ordinary people. I wanted to find, in their ordinariness, something that was revelatory, that didn’t disguise their ordinariness or unduly enhance it, but would prove their importance in the world, and I think I’ve done that.”