Ancestor Trouble
A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
1 of 1 copy available
“A roadmap for all of us who long to understand, at the deepest level, where we come from.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Oprah Daily, Time, Esquire, The Millions, The Week, Thrillist, She Reads, Lit Hub, BookPage
Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was an educated man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms.
Their divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, the meeting of her parents’ lines in Maud inspired an anxiety that she could not shake, a fear that she would replicate their damage. She saw similar anxieties in the lives of friends, in the works of writers and artists she admired. As obsessive in her own way as her parents, Maud researched her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and genocide—and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and the debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.
Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.
*Includes a downloadable PFD of the family trees from the book
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 29, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593556108
- File size: 323529 KB
- Duration: 11:14:01
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 13, 2021
Newton debuts with a masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America’s ancestry through her own family’s complex past. While it’s often “cast as a narcissistic Western peculiarity,” she argues that “ancestor hunger circles the globe” as people have increasingly begun to search for “a deeper sense of community, less ‘I’ and more ‘we.’ ” Newton, though, was raised on fanciful stories of her relatives—including a grandfather with 13 ex-wives, and her great-aunt Maude (the inspiration behind Newton’s writing pseudonym), who died young in an institution—and tales of murder, witchcraft, and spiritual superstition, all of which she interrogates here with a shrewd eye. As she “search backward” through her family’s history in an effort to find redemption and healing, she contextualizes their stories within the nation’s history of white supremacy and religious fundamentalism (her mother was a fervent evangelical who believed their “forebears had sinned in such a way as to open the door to a generational curse”). Most affecting is her rendering of her complicated relationship with her father and his own “racist bloodline,” likening her existence to “a kind of homegrown eugenics project.” The result is a transfixing meditation on the inextricable ways the past informs the present. Agent: Julie Barer, the Book Group.
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