Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

Maud Newton

Random House Publishing Group, Mar 29, 2022 - Biography & Autobiography - 400 pages

“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 • 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—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe).

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.

Her parents’ divorce, when it came, was a relief. Still, her position at the intersection of her family bloodlines inspired in Newton 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, Newton 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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - EllenH - LibraryThing

I'm torn with this book. To begin with Maud does an interesting and thorough job sharing her family history with us, and turned family lore into proven story with all of it's skeletons, murder, racism ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - spinsterrevival - LibraryThing

I love books like this that mix memoir with research. The author as well as her family members all have troubling histories, and she has spent much time to learn more and come to terms with it all. This had me thinking about my family genealogy and what my own ancestor trouble may be.

Contents

• A Doorway: 3
• Like a Lenticular Print: 19
• Skeletons and Magnolias: 33
• Family Secrets: 40
• A Universal Family Tree: 55
• Taking a Bite: 64
• PART THREE NATURE AND NURTURE: 69
• It Skips a Generation: 71
• An Impulse to Leap: 88
• The Idea of Heredity: 99
• Genes Expressing Themselves 12: 112
• PART FOUR PHYSICALITY: 123
• Grandmas Eyes I 25: 125
• The Family Face: 138
• Mugshots from DNA: 148
• PART FIVE TEMPERAMENT: 155
• Grudging Kinship: 157
• Chasing the Dream: 169
• Emotional Recurrences: 184
• PART SIX INHERITANCE: 199
• Heirlooms and Disinheritance: 201
• Monstrous Bequests: 214
• Not Racist: 226
• Disconnection: 233
• Unacknowledged Remains: 246
• PART SEVEN SPIRITUALITY: 251
• The Witch: 253
• Generational Curses: 262
• Veneration: 272
• Lineage Repair: 283
• PART EIGHT CREATIVITY: 297
• The Nan: 299
• Beneficial and Malignant Creativity: 310
• Roots: 321
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: 325
• NOTES: 331
• INDEX: 365

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
• Author: Maud Newton
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2022
• ISBN: 0812997921, 9780812997927
• Length: 400 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; Family & Relationships / Dysfunctional Families; Medical / Genetics