Ancestor Trouble
A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
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Narrated by:
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Catherine Taber
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Written by:
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Maud Newton
About this listen
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.
“A road map for all of us who long to understand, at the deepest level, where we come from.” (Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance)
One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 - Oprah Daily, Time, Esquire, The Millions, The Week, Thrillist, She Reads, Lit Hub, BookPage
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 13 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: 30 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.
*Includes a downloadable PFD of the family trees from the book
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2022 Maud Newton (P)2022 Random House AudioWhat the critics say
“Ancestor Trouble does what all truly great memoirs do: It takes an intensely personal and at times idiosyncratic story and uses it to frame larger, more complex questions about how identity is formed.”—The New Republic
“At a moment of reckoning over America’s violent history, her book is a salutary call for an ‘acknowledgment genealogy’ of the harms that are hidden in many family trees.”—The Economist
“Newton’s great openness to and evocations of all the journeys she took turn into Ancestor Trouble’s great beauty, poignancy, and power.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
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