Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton | Hardcover

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton | Hardcover

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton | Hardcover

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An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family--and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves.

"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.

Review Quotes:

"[R]iveting . . . Masterfully blending memoir and cultural criticism, Newton explores the cultural, scientific, and spiritual dimensions of ancestry, arguing for the transformational power of grappling with our inheritances." --Esquire

 

"[A] powerful debut." --Oprah Daily

 

"In grappling with her history, Newton explores intergenerational trauma, genetics and epigenetics, considering all the ways in which getting to know our ancestors can help us gain perspective on ourselves." --Time

 

"[A] masterful mix of memoir and cultural criticism that wrestles with America's ancestry through her own family's complex past . . . . a transfixing meditation on the inextricable ways the past informs the present." --Publishers Weekly

"Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

 

"We suspect that the hype for this one is real, and then some." --Bookpage

 

"[An] intricately researched account of the most universal subject." --Literary Hub

"An unflinching exploration into the history of a troubled family tree and the universal but also peculiarly American need to discover 'roots.'"-- The Millions
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