Just a heads up y'all this episode contains discussions of sexual assault and rape

I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji. I'm Jean-Tempey and you're listening to Coats which from NPR

If you've been listening to the podcast lately, you know that all this month we're talking about books and

Particularly books about freedom all kinds of freedom

Ensuring freedom is something that we realize that we have only when we no longer have it like when it's been compromised

They're taking away. I was thinking about that a lot when I sat down to talk with Ashley C Ford. I know Ashley

Well, I know of her. I've been following her on Twitter for a very long time. She's an editor. She's an essayist

She's a podcast host a very big deal on the internet as they say

She is all those things. She is also

Far-proposes the author of a new memoir. It's called somebody's daughter and Shireen and knock me on my ass

Okay, tell me about it. What was it that hit you?

A lot of our experiences growing up as a black child of a single mother

Just really resonated with me like at some point

So there were certain pages that felt directly pulled from my childhood like it felt like a little bit too candid in brazing

So yeah, but you know her book is about a lot of things is about race

It's about childhood and it's also about what people and a family older each other

But one of the central facts in this book Shireen is that it's about her fathers incarceration and how his imprisonment

Fundamentally shaped her childhood and the lives of her mother and her siblings

It sounds like a very intense book. It is very much so

But one of the things that was so bracing about somebody's daughter to me is just how clear-eyed

Actually is about everything and everyone that she talks about in it

You know from her father's crime to the ways her mother

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