Ancestor Trouble
A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
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3.5 • 13 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe).
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun
Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts.
Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them.
Searching 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 make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Many of us are fascinated by the search for our ancestors—so journalist Maud Newton decided to find out why. What started as a dive into her own family’s soap-opera-like past soon became a study of genealogy itself. The result is a fantastic hybrid of informative nonfiction and deeply personal memoir, reminiscent of both Joan Didion and Malcolm Gladwell. Newton gives us detailed breakdowns of genealogical theory, which in turn help us understand her emotional stories about the process of uncovering her own family tree. Her journey is wild and sometimes shocking, whether she’s discussing her direct ties to accused witches, her family’s history as slave owners, or her theories about generational trauma. We loved how Newton takes an almost clinical approach to the study of ancestry, saving her emotions for the book’s more personal sections. Ancestor Trouble is a riveting look at why we’re so captivated by the past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
