Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
Maud Newton’s life began as an experiment in genetics, said Lorraine Berry in The Boston Globe. Her father, a white supremacist, married her mother not for love but because he thought they would have smart children.
Now long estranged from her father, Newton delves into her troubled ancestral lineage in this “beautiful and complexly nuanced” memoir. As Newton “shakes her family tree,” she uncovers uncomfortable truths about her ancestry—which includes forebears who were enslavers and stole land from Native Americans—and tackles questions about her personal responsibility to atone for the legacy she inherited.
“This is rich material for a soul-searching memoir,” said Mary Ann Gwinn in the Los Angeles Times. Newton’s journey leads her down “multiple roads (and many blind alleys)” as she explores subjects like genetics, eugenics, and epigenetics through an intimate personal lens, considering what it means for her that her paternal grandparents were wealthy plantation owners, or that her maternal great-grandfather was a murderer. “This combination of personal revelation and synthesis works, for the most part,” because Newton writes with “lacerating honesty” and because she contemplates both the good and bad of her genetic legacy. “In an act of generosity, Newton lays her writing ability at the feet of her father and his family” too.
Ultimately, 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,” said Colin Dickey in The New Republic. Newton’s personal narrative offers us an opportunity to ponder some universal questions: “How much of what is inherited is inescapable? What is nature, and what is nurture?” As she explores these subjects, Newton subtly shifts from “genealogical spelunking” to a “gentle exorcism” of the mistakes her ancestors made in life as she seeks “a larger, richer, and more open understanding of lineage and heritage.”
(Random House, $29)