Excerpt from Somebody's Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That's how I ended up picking films like Lorenzo's Oil, Passion Fish, and Groundhog Day. I was easy to please, and never protested my grandmother's picks, even after Fire in the Sky made me cry myself to sleep for a week. My grandmother was loving, but being comforting wasn't her gift. Each night she taught me to read alternating between the Holy Bible, Barbie comics, and supermarket celebrity tabloids. I thought Princess Diana and Mary Magdalene would have looked similar. I thought the same about Billy Ray Cyrus and Jesus.

When the thought of alien abduction kept me up, the Star magazine I kept under my pillow reminded me to stop holding my breath. Living with my grandmother and her father in the fields of Missouri, I learned to think only of myself for hours at a time. Spending half a day alone, free of the company of people who would distract me from my being, I learned to think about who I was, who I was becoming, and what I wanted.

I spent my free time exploring my great-grandfather's land, roaming farther than I was allowed. Too young and dumb to be scared of them, I made a game of sneaking up on and catching garden snakes by the tail. I caught them fast enough to shock them, and then dropped them before they caught my skin between their fangs. I was only bitten once. It was fast and painful, but I did not scream. My eyes got wide and my arms flailed around until it let go. After the garden snake released me, I closed my eyes and leaned against a tree. I steadied my breath and soothed myself by speaking directly into the two puncture wounds in my first finger.

"It don't hurt, Ashley." I cradled the stinging hand with its opposite. "If it hurt, you'd die. You won't die."

* * *

On our Christmas visit to Indiana, my mother accused my grandmother of turning me against her.

"She acts like she doesn't even know who I am."

My mother's tongue was coated in venom, her familiar anger rising in the back of her throat.

A few days before Christmas, my mother came into the living room and saw me playing with a doll. It was the same doll she'd bought and wrapped for me under the tree. It was a doll she knew I'd love, something she hoped would remind me of the games we used to play, and the life we'd had together back when we lived in the studio apartment. Now she was renting a two-bedroom house with enough room for me to return, but I was still in Missouri. No one thought it would be a good idea for me to move back to Fort Wayne in the middle of a school year. But my mother missed me, and wanted me home.

She screamed at me for opening the present, a gift she had to have worked overtime to purchase. I did not only feel distant from my mother, I felt angry with her, and unsure of what she wanted with me. She sent me away, called me back, and now she seemed mad that I was here. I started to walk away from her and found myself buried face-first in her living room carpet. My mother kicked me. I didn't cry.

After a few moments, my mother picked me up and held me against her. Being held was rare, and precious, an offering in and of itself. I rejected it, making my body go limp. I hoped she thought I was dead or paralyzed. I wanted her to think she'd really hurt me. I wanted her to apologize like her old boyfriend did. My grandmother walked into the room, took a look at us, and asked what happened. My mother told her I'd opened my gift. My grandmother explained that she'd bought me the same doll in Missouri. My grandmother knelt beside me.

"Are you okay, baby?"

I looked toward the front door. "I'm fine. It don't hurt. I'm not dead." My mother walked into her bedroom and shut the door.

"Grandma, tell her it's okay. I'm not dead. I'm alive."

When my grandmother and I returned to the farmhouse, I jumped out of my grandfather's car and ran into the house. I ran into the sitting room where my tea set was always on the back table, then into the bathroom where my good toothbrush was still in the pink cup behind the sink. I touched all the things that reminded me of my new life in Missouri where no one hit me, I could read as much as I wanted, and there were no rusty red stains left in rings around the bathtub. I spoke to my grandmother without looking at her.

Excerpted from Somebody's Daughter: A Memoir. Used with the permission of the publisher, Flatiron Books. Copyright © 2021 by Ashley C. Ford.