Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice) Roxane Gays Audacious Book Club Pick Finalist for the National Book Critics Circles John Leonard Prize An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern familyand finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselvesin 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 Newtons ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mothers father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mothers grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Mauds maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newtons 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 genealogyher grandfathers 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 modernitys dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writers attempt to use genealogya once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industryto 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.