At the age of nine, Alice Ozma and her father, Jim, set themselves a challenge: he would read to her every day for 100 days. They started with The Tin Woodman of Oz and ended with Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days by Stephen Manes. The next morning, they celebrated completing the "Streak", as it would become known, with pancakes at their favourite diner near their home in Millville, New Jersey, on the US east coast. Then Alice suggested that they carry on for 1,000 nights.

Jim, a children's librarian, was dubious about the prospect. Little did he know that he would end up reading to his daughter every night for 3,218 nights – nearly nine full years – until the day she left for college. They devoured hundreds of books: children's titles by Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl, teenage novels by Judy Blume and Anthony Horowitz, and weightier reads such as Great Expectations and Macbeth.

One unexpected result was that they re-read the Harry Potter books many times. "Every time a new book came out, we would read all the books leading up to it so we would be ready," says Alice. "We probably read Harry Potter for something like three and a half years. He didn't really like the series – he thought it wasn't particularly literary."

All of this is revealed in Alice's "embarrassingly mushy" memoir, The Reading Promise. It isn't so much a story about the books, but about the space that books give father and daughter. Alice writes that her father isn't an overly affectionate man, and the only time they cuddled up was on those nights on his bed, her head resting on his chest as he read a chapter or two aloud. Then, after a fight, she lay sulkily on the other side of the bed and never again found her way back into his arms. "I do think it had to happen eventually," she says, on the phone from her home in Philadelphia. "I couldn't picture myself as an 18-year-old girl lying there in the crook of his arm, but [the physical closeness] I remember nostalgically."

Jim, a children's librarian, gave his younger daughter a literary name. She was born Kerstin Brozina but at 16 changed it to her middle names, both chosen by her father – Alice, from Alice in Wonderland and Ozma, the princess in L Frank Baum's Oz books.

Jim hasn't read Alice's book, which is a shame, I think, because what father wouldn't want to read a love letter to himself from his clever, funny daughter? She says she couldn't have written it without first extracting promises from her family that they wouldn't read it. "I'd have found it more difficult to be honest if I knew he was going to read it; it felt way too personal. I never kept a diary, but having my dad read this would be like him reading my diary, and I don't think I would ever feel comfortable with it. I was also embarrassed by the mushiness of the book.

"He was dying to read it – he was trying to make deals with me. Eventually he just adjusted to the idea that I really didn't want him to, and once he did that, it stopped being important to him."

Alice's sister, Kathy, who is seven years older, ignored her request and read it. "I was really uncomfortable about that because I thought she would remember things differently or tell me I had got things wrong," says Alice. "But she said it just brought up all of these memories, that she could put herself in the moment and picture those things happening. That was really nice; that someone who had been there for so many of the scenes said, 'Yeah, that's how it happened.'"

On day 440 of the Streak, Alice's mother moved out. This didn't come as a shock. Alice discovered her carrying boxes to her car on Thanksgiving. She knew her parents had been fighting for months, and that her mother had already talked about getting her own apartment. She even knew that her mother spent time talking to other men on the phone, or by email. Curiously, perhaps tellingly, she dedicates more to the death of her goldfish in the previous chapter than to her mother's departure. Later on, a traumatic memory of her mother from years earlier takes on a dream-like quality, as if it is too shocking to be considered any more real than one of the stories she and her father read.

When Alice started writing the book, she says it was difficult for her mother, "because she knew it was going to be about my dad and my relationship with him, and it's not the prettiest picture of her. She never said hold back, she said, 'Write what you think is true', which I really appreciated.

"She said, 'I don't want to seem like an absent mother.' But the writing of the book is telling how I remember it. My mother and I had rough patches during my middle and senior high school years. I would say it's better now. She wants nothing more than for the book to do well and me to be happy."

Were there aspects of family life that Alice thought twice about including? "There are things I chose not to include. I think in order to understand my family's dynamic, you have to understand who my mother is or was. If I didn't include that, I think it would make less sense. Some of what my father and I were doing was reactionary and you need to know what we were reacting to."

The Streak took on even more importance once it was just Jim and Alice (her sister had left home). It could often be therapeutic – Jim used the Streak, writes Alice, "as a solution to a problem. It was something he did often, even if he wasn't doing it intentionally. After my mother moved out, we read stories about young girls without mothers. When there were bullies at school, we read about kids who outsmarted their nemeses rather than resorting to fistfights."

She remembers Journey, by Patricia MacLachlan, about a young boy and his older sister who are abandoned by their mother, and Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff, about a girl who is fostered by an emotionally unstable woman. Jim chose so many stories about being a single dad that he remarked, slightly clumsily, on the coincidence. "He said at the time, and maybe I believed him, 'This is so weird, they write so many books about this topic. I guess we'll have to read about it.'" Does she think it helped him deal with what was happening to their family too? "Yes. I think he was not only reading about it, but speaking it – he was saying these words out loud. There's something very therapeutic about talking, even when it's someone else's lines." Saying things he wanted to say? She pauses for a second. "I'm sure there were books that said that, definitely."

She says her father chose most of the books. The only one she remembers really not wanting to read was The Old Curiosity Shop. "I still think it's a miserable book," she says. "Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. You have moments of hope and then you go back to despair. It is so long, too! I said I didn't want to spend two months reading something I hate. But we read it anyway."

Her favourites included the Harry Potter series, "and Each Little Bird that Sings by Deborah Wiles – it's about a little girl raised in a funeral parlour and she's got this resilient spirit and is really fun. I liked Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers. I also liked Ten Little Indians, which got me reading Agatha Christie on my own."

Even when Alice was an older teenager and had started staying out late with friends, the Streak continued. A lot of her friends knew – "I didn't drive, so if we were out somewhere, I would say, 'My dad hasn't read to me, can someone take me back?'" – and she says she was never embarrassed by it. "I grew up with it. It was who I am."

There were times when they came close to missing the deadline – she can remember racing up the stairs shouting "get the book!" as midnight approached after being delayed at a level crossing, and of her father pulling over by the side of the road to read to her if they had been out late together. When she would go away, such as the time she went to camp, the Streak continued over the phone.

She says she doesn't remember them having a discussion about ending the Streak, just an unspoken acknowledgement that it would have to finish when she went to college. How did she feel as that day approached? "I didn't think about it, it was something I pushed to the back of my mind. It was too emotional. I didn't try to picture what it would be like, nothing." When it finally happened, she says it was harder to get used to not being read to at night than it was to be away from home. (With amazing luck, Alice found a boyfriend who would make up stories for her every night.)

The Streak ended several years ago. Alice is 23, and is about to become a teacher. Meanwhile, her father is stockpiling children's books to read to his future grandchildren.

At the end of her book, Alice includes a Reading Promise, for other people to make. "It's really important to me that other parents have the opportunity to do what my father and I did," she says. "Some people just never stop and think about it. It would mean a lot to me that parents at least give this a try. If they try reading to their kids more often, it will make their kids more literate, and it's time spent together. I don't think there's any aspect of starting a reading streak that parents and children shouldn't be able to get behind."

What sort of effect did it have on their relationship? "I can't imagine what our relationship would have been like without it. It gave us something to talk about, because there isn't always something to talk about – we're 40 years apart. We have quotes in our vocabulary that are from books that we use without even thinking. It's become our shared language."

Most importantly, in a childhood that was occasionally chaotic and a family that had shrunk, "it gave us a time that we always knew we would spend together. Most parents think they spend 15 minutes with their kid every day, but if they really thought about it, it may be less true than they think. We were close, but there were times when the Streak was the only quality time we spent together every day."

The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99.To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846