When it comes to summing up Ashley C. Ford's childhood, "complicated" feels like a cop-out, but it's maybe the only accurate way to say it. Fraught with hurt and confusion, tinged with love and beauty, Ford lays out those years in vivid, painful detail in her stunning debut memoir, Somebody's Daughter , (out June 1). Growing up in Indiana, Ford can't imagine a world without her big, loud, sprawling family, and especially the two women at the center of it: her mother and grandmother. Though at times charming and playful, Ford's mother also violently punishes her children for seemingly small offenses, and Ford learns to live around this apparent split in her personality, which she understands as the difference between her loving "Mama" and punitive "Mother." The tension and stress of waiting for the next outburst leads to panic attacks, Ford's precocious intellect strangled by anxiety and abuse. At the center of it all is the bleak ...