Its genius lies in its unmasking of the real motives that drive us to send off our saliva for DNA analysis.'Extraordinary and wide-ranging. the book ends a far sight from where it’s begun, having sloughed off simplistic questions about heredity. Using her own family tree, with its mix of colorful characters, closet-lurking skeletons, and truly vile monsters, Newton recounts the tall tales about these folks she grew up with before revealing what dogged and thorough research has turned up about their actual lives. 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. How much of what is inherited is inescapable? What is nature, and what is nurture?. Newton starts with a similar curiosity but quickly moves to more interesting questions. We look to family trees perhaps because of an interest in history, but ultimately because we want to know more about ourselves. Ancestor Trouble is also a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity, and it’s a blueprint for making something of cultural, intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual and genetic legacies often burdened with messy debris. Newton’s pursuit gathers into a fist of anguish as she traces and faces 'monstrous bequests' of racism, from Southern ancestors who enslaved people to a Northern ancestor who helped drive Indigenous people from their villages in western Massachusetts. It makes sense, this method - which becomes the book’s structure, too - because curiosity and lives never proceed in direct paths. When one inquiry reaches its natural end, she belays herself back and begins another route. Her genealogical investigation transforms into an investigation of genealogy itself, a subject rich with conjecture and a perennial social longing that she terms 'ancestor hunger'. We sink as deep into history, science and spirituality as we do into Newton’s family tree. Who am I? is the question troubling Maud Newton in her extraordinary and wide-ranging book.

Review ancestor trouble