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A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
by Maud Newton
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.
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.
"The current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting...Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Newton debuts with 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
"An engaging and thoroughly researched memoir relaying a family history that is at turns recognizable and abhorrent, as an honest and typical history of American exceptionalism, racism, and misogyny. Will appealing to lovers of memoirs, family secrets, genealogy, and the sociological makeup threading U.S. history." - Library Journal
"Riveting...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
"Who are our ancestors to us? What do we inherit from them, and how do we grapple with their legacy? Ancestor Trouble drills deep into the roots and bones of Newton's own family, and is a roadmap for all of us who long to understand, at the deepest level, where we come from." - Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
"Here is a wise and unsparing journey through many generations of one family. Newton takes this extraordinary journey not only for herself, but to illuminate this present moment in this country we all love. 'Look,' she tells us. 'This is America. This is how we came to be.'" - Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
"A haunting, thought-provoking, and utterly mesmerizing book." - Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Ghosts of Eden Park
This information about Ancestor Trouble was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Maud Newton has written for the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, and Oxford American. She grew up in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in English and law.
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