2021: Misleading marketing left me disappointed in this memoir overall, which is a bummer.

I went into this book thinking that it would primarily be about what it was like to have a father in prison. That's maybe 20% of the story. Ford's father is lightly touched upon, but very quickly becomes relegated to the background. The main relationship explored in this book is between Ford and her mother. Ford's grandmother fills a lot of the pages, and Ford's romantic partners (both the good and the bad) make up the rest.

This memoir was a disjointed stream of consciousness that I found hard to get into. We met and left characters with abandon, and I was thrown by each new chapter. The story started off strong, and I was just wrapping my head around the characters introduced, when it began to branch out into different directions and totally lose steam. Things geared back up again at the end, when Ashley goes to visit her father in prison, and sails smoothly on through the final couple of chapters. But the middle of the memoir lost me enough that I was left feeling very disappointed overall.