num_pages: 378
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.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 a mental institution. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Mauds maternal lines to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Mauds father an aerospace engineer turned lawyer was a book-smart 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 sunk 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 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 once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industryto expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors has for all of us.
language: English
title: Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
publisher: Random House