Maud Newton on ANCESTOR TROUBLE
\u201cAs you might imagine, over the years, many people heard stories about my family. And they said,\xa0Hey, why don't you write a memoir? I really wasn't very interested in writing a memoir as I perceived a memoir to be, so the idea of spending years working on a book about the issues in my immediate family, which I grew up with, and was intimately familiar with, it felt like I would be locked in a closet with that somehow. And then I became sort of interested in looking backward...\u201d Maud Newton used to believe her research into her family\u2019s genealogy was just a distraction from the novel she\u2019d been working on. Not so. Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation\xa0is just out, and Maud joins us on the show to talk about where her curiosity took her, DNA sleuthing, facing her family\u2019s legacies (genetic + historical + behavioral), epigenetics, what Harry Crews taught her about writing, and much more with Poured Over\u2019s host, Miwa Messer.
Featured book:\xa0Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation\xa0by Maud Newton
And a few of the books that Maud mentions in hers:
Where I Was From\xa0by Joan Didion
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee\xa0by David Treuer
The Gene\xa0by Siddhartha Mukherjee
On the Origin of Species\xa0by Charles Darwin
The Mismeasure of Man\xa0by Stephen Jay Gould
The Mistress\u2019s Daughter\xa0by AM Homes
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love\xa0by Dani Shapiro
Touched with Fire\xa0by Kay Redfield Jamison
The Collected Schizophrenias\xa0by Esm\xe9 Weijun Wang
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on\xa0Earth\xa0by Sarah Smarsh
Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African\xa0Diaspora\xa0by Emily Raboteau
Braiding Sweetgrass\xa0by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Poured Over is produced and hosted Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays.)
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