And about America’s “ancestry craze,” as he put it. Then, in 2013, an editor at Harper’s, Chris Beha, asked me if I wanted to write an article about my family. And I was berating myself for wasting time on that. So I was constantly researching in these genealogy databases, and whatnot. I viewed those posts as a distraction from what I thought of as the important work of the novel I was working on. So that’s been a really, really long time. But yeah, those blog posts started in 2007. Maud Newton: I worked on as a book for seven years. What was the process like, consolidating a blog into these eight highly organized sections of a book?

Surya Hendry: I noticed that you said that this book was over a decade in the making, especially because you had a blog, where you were discussing all of the ways that you found out about the history of your family.

Her blog, which she started in the 2000s, has been praised by The New Yorker, among other big names. She does not blog as frequently as she used to, but she writes a monthly-ish newsletter. In addition to her memoir, Maud Newton is an essayist, critic, and fiction writer. The New York Times has called Ancestor Trouble “a literary feat” that “simultaneously builds and excavates identity.” She begins with an investigation of her own family: a father who “extolled the virtues of slavery,” a grandfather who married at least 11 times, a great-grandfather who killed another man with a hay hook.īy the end of Ancestor Trouble, Newton has considered epigenetic studies, DNA-powered surveillance, intergenerational wealth, Renaissance-era inheritance myths, and spiritual practices that recognize ancestral ties. In her debut book, Ancestor Trouble, Maud Newton explores the nature of inheritance. Ancestor Trouble author Maud Newton / Photo by Maximus Clarke

Ancestor trouble book