Sombody's Daughter (BookTube Prize for Nonfiction - Group G)

 In Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford takes the reader (or listener in my case) through her life, beginning with a more recent event in the author’s life — a surprise call from her mother to let her know that her father, who has been incarcerated for the entirety of her remembered life, is being released. Ford then takes the reader back through the progression of her life as a child, being raised in Indiana essentially by a single mother and her grandmother, dealing with incomplete knowledge of her incarcerated father and a largely one-sided relationship where he professes to adore her, but she can barely remember anything about him. Ford pulls the reader through a number of difficult and traumatic experiences including sexual assault and physical and emotional abuse during childhood. I highly recommend content warnings for any readers who may need them, as Ford’s story does not shy away from difficult things.
    
    This memoir certainly did not feel like a clunky debut in any way and makes me excited for the ongoing work of this author. The author herself reads the memoir for the audiobook, and I think that the memoir genre in particular can be well-served through personal storytelling in that format. Had I read this book in physical form, I still think I would have been struck by the smoothness and craftsmanship of the prose, and as I listened there were many lines that stood out to me. The writing quality is strong: both simple and accessible, but quite beautiful. While the majority of the book is organized in a straightforward chronological telling of Ford’s life and experience, the bookends of Ford receiving the call from her mother about her dad and the final part of the memoir where Ford goes to meet her father with her mother provides the story with a circular feeling that is satisfying to the reader even as Ford’s story doesn’t have a standard happy ending in the sense that not everything is perfect and not all relationships are completely resolved. In fact, in a discussion included at the end of the audiobook, Ford discusses the book with fellow author Clint Smith and mentions that she is taking two different approaches to sharing her memoir with each of her parents as their relationships are complicated and require different things at this point.
    
    At the end of the day, it feels like the main point of this memoir is a personal reckoning with our lives being defined during childhood, and often into adulthood, by the unprocessed traumas, experiences, failures, and wishes of the adults that raise us and impact our lives. Ford unpacks some of the generational trauma of her family through to herself and then explores how racial and sexual violence can ripple through your lineage and express itself through the experiences of a specific individual. Ford’s first-person experience sometimes feels removed and distant in a way that itself mimics the dissociation that the author recounts as she experiences many different layers of violence and love all mixed together in a confusing and throughly human way.
    
    This book is in many ways the first memoir I’ve ever read that recounts this kind of story: a Black woman raised in the mid-west, a child of an incarcerated father and a mother who was only available to her daughter in certain ways and was clearly dealing with her own unprocessed trauma, abuse, and anxiety. Ford’s experiences are throughly wrapped up in her specific identities, and yet despite how dissimilar our backgrounds are in many major ways, I felt so much of my own experiences reflected back by this author. This can be, in many ways, the beauty of the memoir form when done well, the ability to capture something very personal and specific and also highlight common experiences that are not often discussed or represented in popular culture. There were somewhat banal but beautifully relatable moments where Ford recounted the freedom she felt as a child when swinging on a swing set, or her driving anxiety that kept her from being comfortable driving herself to visit her father in prison.

    Ford heartbreakingly details how patterns of sexual violence can repeat themselves within families when assault and abuse is conflated with healthy expressions of sexuality. She writes with piercing clarity how anxiety-inducing and disturbing it can be as a young girl and woman to receive messages that our appearance and usefulness to men is valuable while also constantly placing us in danger of abuse. In particular, many Black women living in the U.S. are sexualized from extremely young ages and treated as adults while still being small children. Openly embracing sexuality and enjoying sex in any overt way can feel dangerous and because many people experience healthy sexual urges from a young age, when people do also experience abuse and sexual violence it can feel like their fault. Even growing up in a family that was relatively sex positive, the specter of abuses that others had experienced caused me to feel this immense anxiety and fear from a young age over the possibility of imminent abuse. In Ford’s case, the anxiety, stress, and family messages preceding her rape and inappropriate contact from an adult man in her life caused her to feel guilt, depression, and shame about what happened and no sense of safety in bringing this abuse to light until she was much older. Sexual predators take advantage of the cloud of shame and personal responsibility that our culture weaves around our narratives of assault and abuse, so it was truly heartening to read Ford’s recounting of her experiences in the sense that it made me feel seen and that there is more space for discussing these struggles in broad daylight.
    
    Reading this memoir created a meaningful and engaging experience. I listened to this memoir while reading Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell which is a nonfiction introduction to police and prison abolition. These two books were fantastic to pair together, as I think Ford writes so evocatively of some of the immediate impacts of incarceration on a family and the ways the carceral system in the United States can cause family fracturing and ultimately not offer a restorative process for families of victims and families of perpetrators. Many people who perpetuate violence are also victims of violence themselves, and yet our current system focuses on removal from social groups, isolation, the breaking up of families, and punishment as opposed to genuine healing and recovery from violence and abuse. While this book is intensely personal and unique, it takes a seat in my mind with Hunger by Roxane Gay and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby, two books that succeed in highlighting how the personal is political and how systems of injustice and patterns of harm can play out through personal experiences.