When Ashley visits her father in prison for the first time in thirteen years, he says to her: 

Do me a favor, Ashley? When you write about you and me? Just tell the truth. Your truth. Don’t worry about nobody’s feelings, especially not mine. You gotta be tough to tell your truth, but it’s the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.

These lines from Ford’s father easily articulate the core themes of the memoir.

In the past couple of decades, the genre of the “trauma memoir” has exploded—often these books are written by women and people who identify as queer, and they often deal directly with experiences of sexual and gender-based violence. Ranging from the semi-autobiographical fiction of Dorothy Allison to Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House or the confessional work of Roxane Gay (a mentor to Ford), this subgenre attests to the power and popularity of “telling your truth” in written form. Survivors of all kinds of intimate partner violence describe feeling silenced; in publishing their own stories, these narrators reclaim their voices. By articulating the violence she experienced growing up, Ford begins to own her experiences and heal from them.

Somebody’s Daughter, then, is operating on dual levels of “truth-telling,” or narrativizing Ford’s own life: her memoir tells the story of Ashley learning how to tell her own story. As a younger writer, Ford made her debut with an essay about her rape and her father’s incarceration. Her memoir expands on this earlier confessional project. Ford reworks and reinscribes her narration of her own life, and in doing so, offers her truth to an audience of readers. For the memoir genre, the position of the reader is particularly charged: What does it mean to be the recipient of another person’s “truth?”

Ford’s reader (and the reader of the trauma memoir more broadly) is bestowed with a certain responsibility: to believe the narrator and trust her with the truth. In much the same way that a survivor of sexual assault should be believed when they disclose what has happened to them, the reader of the memoir is trusted with sensitive information and must respond in kind. Somebody’s Daughter describes many instances of adults not trusting Ashley, not believing her, and dismissing her wants and needs. In Ford’s cathartic truth-telling, the memoir form demands the reader’s belief; moreover, it demands attention be paid to the narrator’s pain. As a child, Ashley’s pain and suffering was not given its proper due. In the form of the memoir, this “conflict” is resolved. By giving Ashley the affirmation of attention she needed when she was younger, the reader becomes necessary to the resolution of the narrative. The story reaches its conclusion in its being read.

Somebody’s Daughter is rich with instances of the pain of silence and secrecy. Ashley keeps secrets from her mother out of fear—fear of her mother’s violence, fear of her own culpability, and the fear that she won’t be believed. When an adult man kisses her at a New Year’s Eve party, and when Ashley is raped in her own backyard, she cannot trust others with her truth. By keeping her pain to herself, Ashley internalizes it, believing she deserves it. Only when she begins to trust others to care for her—Brett, her friend Trent, and finally her mother—does Ashley begin to heal from what has happened to her. The restorative power of sharing one’s pain emerges as a theme both within the memoir on a textual level, and between narrator and reader during the act of reading.

In her conversation with her father, Ashley...