Description
An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern familyand 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 fromDani Shapiro author of Inheritance
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022Oprah Daily Time Esquire The Millions The Week Thrillist She Reads Lit Hub BookPage
Maud Newtons ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl Her mothers 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 mothers grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in an institution Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Mauds maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritanera Massachusetts Mauds 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 Mauds mother a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects thirty rescue cats and a church in the familys 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 genealogyher grandfathers marriages the accused witch her ancestors roles in slavery and genocideand 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 modernitys dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them
Searching moving and inspiring Ancestor Trouble is one writers attempt to use genealogya onceniche hobby that has grown into a multibilliondollar industryto 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
Includes a downloadable PFD of the family trees from the book
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