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Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir by Ashley C. Ford

54 reviews

veronicats's review against another edition

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Oh my God.
I don't read a lot of memoirs or non fiction in general these days, but I am SO glad I read this. I smiled a lot, I cried, I was thinking about passages and phrases and quotes from it for hours afterwards.
I think this is hit so close because she talks about her relationships with her parents. The emotionally absent mother and physically absent father are figures I know only too well. She said so many things I've thought but could never articulate.
I recommend this to everyone. It is so, so good. So powerful. I know I'll be coming back to things I read in this book a LOT.

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liblibby's review against another edition

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challenging emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

5.0

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shewantsthediction's review against another edition

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

Legitimately one of the best memoirs I've ever read. Finished the audio in a single day. The only thing missing was Ashley confronting her dad about his crimes and them talking about it more in depth (which I'm assuming she eventually did, but just wasn't in the book).

When I was four years old, I taught myself to lie awake until morning. I wanted the sunrise, and I only had to stay awake to have her. When children are small, our desires seem small, even if we want the sky. Anything we want seems to be only a matter of time and effort away. It's too early to imagine what's already holding you back.

When we were bad, my mother hit us for it, and there was always the thought that I would die in the back of my mind. I didn't think my mother wanted to kill me on purpose; it was her eyes. My mother's rage drained the light from her eyes, and she became unrecognizable to me. There was Mama—the loving mother we knew before whatever sparked her ire—and then there was Mother, who showed up in her place. Mother felt separate, somehow apart from our otherwise happy and harmonious existence. She rose from somewhere within Mama, and did the latter's dirty work. Every once in awhile, my brother and I were the dirty work needing done. I sat quietly on the couch, watching my mother, trying to be very still. I knew Mama would find her cigarettes in the black trash bag eventually, a few of them ripped in half to ensure their loss. When she did, I was going to get hit, and I was already afraid of the pain. I couldn't and I wouldn't tell on myself. Self-preservation had already been imprinted upon me as a requirement. Honesty was not always the best policy. Grown-ups would tell you it was important to tell the truth, and when you did, everything would work out. But I knew this wasn't the case. There must have been a time before, a time when I'd done something bad, realized it, and told on myself. The punishment I received for the forgotten transgression must've been severe, because the next time I was alone and I did something bad, it belonged only to me. I learned to carry the secrets of my badness silently and alone. There would be no more confessions from me. Whoever wanted to know how bad I could be would have to get close enough to find out, and nobody tried. My mother didn't stop searching for her cigarettes. I hoped, for a moment, she might question if she'd actually been the one to throw them away. These things happened accidentally. That would've been lucky for me, but I did not feel like a lucky child. I saw too much, and suspected even more than that.

I spoke to my grandmother without looking at her. "Don't ever make me leave again, okay? I don't wanna leave again."

She looked down at me, then into the backyard, into the places I played without permission. She grabbed my hand and walked me out toward the trees, grabbing a shovel and a burlap bag next to the grill on the way. We walked farther and father back, until we were in the part of our land where my great-grandfather let the grasses grow long. My grandmother stomped around a bit, then staked the shovel's blade into the dirt. She dug slowly and with purpose, like she was sneaking up on the earth spread out before us. The ground was soft, so it wasn't long before she told me to come closer. I leaned over the hole and saw a garden snake. No, two. Three, four... A LOT of garden snakes. They were in some sort of a knot, though not stuck together. They moved quickly and deliberately, over and around one another. They were not fighting, and they did not seem to be trying to get away from us or anything else.

"What are they doing, grandma?"

My grandmother stared into the hole. "They're loving each other, baby." She reached into the bag, poured lighter fluid into the hole, then a lit match. The grass in and around the hole burned, and then so did the snakes. My first instinct was to reach in and throw them as far as I could, to safety. But I hesitated when I remembered their bite. I waited too long to do them any good. The snakes did not slither away or thrash around as they burned, they held each other tighter. Even as the scales melted from their bodies, their inclination was to squeeze closer to the other snakes wrapped around them. Their green lengths blackened and bubbled, causing the flesh that simmered underneath each individual metallic hood to ooze. They did not panic. They did not run. I started to cry.

"You will have to go back. We'll both go home. Your mama misses you." My grandmother reached over and grabbed my hand, both of us still staring into the hole. "These things catch fire without letting each other go. We don't give up on our people. We don't stop loving them." She looked into my face, her eyes watering at the bottoms. "Not even when we're burning alive."

My imagination had already taken me on a million wild rides, but here was unlimited adventure. For the rest of my life, I would seek out the library the way some search for the soft light of a chapel in the dark.

I didn't bother to hide my strangest parts from anyone weirder than me. At that point, hiding was only done out of insecurity, or a contextual sense of propriety. It's hard to not know you're weird when you are. The world will either tell you directly, or isolate you into understanding that something about you rubs others the wrong way. I believed you could learn to outsmart your personality, but I knew you couldn't hide from people who really saw you, and saw themselves in the part of you that tended to be just a little bit bent to the left. No matter what you wanted to hide from yourself, you couldn't hide it from the people whose particular brand of bent matched yours. The effort was moot. Weird kids always find each other.

When Mr. Martin asked why I didn't come around anymore, I made something up about babysitting my siblings. He had been kind to me. He'd helped me. But I was not his daughter, and my clothes were too tight, and I didn't want him to die. Any kindness that existed between us was bound to be tainted by how I looked, and how that made any interaction rife for the potential for wrongdoing. Who I was inside, who I wanted to be, didn't match the intentions of my body. The outside of me didn't present a little girl to be loved innocently. My body was a barrier.

Walking through the village in Munsi (?), I would see someone sitting with their parents on the patio of a restaurant. Sometimes I would feel the familiar pangs of longing, but more often it was sympathy. It was hard for me to imagine that the child might be having a nice time with their parents, even if they were good at faking it. I thought, I am freer than you, and that is worth all the things I don't have. I was alone in a college town, managing and caring for myself with limited guidance. I did not find ease, but I did find temporary moments of peace. I had more direct control of my comings and goings than I'd ever had before. I could plainly see where I was already lagging behind others when it came to material wealth, and how the impact of my decisions would be tempered by that fact, but for the first time in my entire life, I didn't feel watched. My mistakes, however big or small, to the people around me, were just... mistakes. I was never accused of plotting against anyone's wellbeing, or attempting to ruin their day. For weeks at a time, I didn't hear anyone scream in anger, and if I did, it was never directed at me, so I felt I had nothing to fear. On campus, cloaked in the protection of an emerging adulthood, I did not feel the need to court a new kind of chaos, and so chaos had to work to find me. College became, as it has for so many others, a refuge as well as a resource.

Most of my life, I've been surrounded by well-dressed women. My grandmother was a cosmetologist and seriously fashionable old lady, and her daughters followed suit. When I was small, I bent to her will easily. She could dress me however she saw fit, even when it meant I looked like a 7-year-old going on 60. As I got older, I wanted to assert my own style, which posed a problem because I didn't have any style. Grandma would shake her head at me and say, "Someday, baby, you'll really understand how to dress. I'm just gonna pray on that for you."

For her, style was all about following rules. There was no room to be playful. Because I couldn't see how I fit into those rules, I refused to play the game. There was no way my mother would be able to afford to keep me decked out in trendy clothes, schedule regular hair appointments, or teach me how to use makeup she didn't wear. It doesn't take long for children to teach themselves not to want what they've already learned they won't have.

I couldn't find a good enough reason to torture myself by acknowledging my futile desires for more stuff. For many years, I just didn't try. The few times I did--for special occasions or at the behest of my grandmother--felt unnatural and like everyone could see how uncomfortable I was in my skin. Even if I looked glamorous in the moment, it seemed I was out of my body, and keenly aware of everyone else's eyes on me. Being on anyone's radar because of how I looked made me feel like I was only seconds from ridicule. Even if I had no real interest in wearing the right clothes the right way, I didn't wanna be made fun of for not even knowing how.

My mother wasn't perfect. Our relationship was complicated and difficult. She was my imperfect mother. We were two different people, and found that hard to accept in one another. But I was hers, and she was mine. That's how it had always been. Who would I be, if not hers?

It was never my intention to hurt or frustrate my grandmother, but it felt so important she know—that all my family know—I was not coming back, because I was not the same person. And I could not, would not pretend. Really it was for their own good. I complicated the narrative they wanted to live by, and it didn't bother me until it bothered them. I didn't wanna run from my family. I wanted to be who I was, and I didn't know if that person fit among them anymore. I was afraid to find out that I wouldn't. My lessons hadn't always come the way I wanted or hoped, but I was not ashamed of how I had changed, and I was determined to remember that. Sometimes, when I was with my family, I forgot.

Content Warnings

delz's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Ashley C. Ford has put on paper a very personal at times, heart wrenching account of her volatile family. *trigger warnings for a single (1 page) rape(not described graphically) and domestic violence.

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