BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Literary Festival invites everyone to join them on Friday, Sept. 9, at 5 p.m., when their monthly online Literary Cocktail Hour presents writer and critic Maud Newton, who will discuss her debut book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation.
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.
Newton'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 such as 30 rescue cats and a church in the family's living room where she performed exorcisms.
“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,” according to a news release.
Ancestor Trouble has been called “a literary feat” by The New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by The Boston Globe. It was named one of Esquire's best books of 2022, and excerpts from the book have appeared in Esquire, Time, and The Wall Street Journal.
Newton will be interviewed by Rebecca Donner, who is the author of the New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, which won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the 2022 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the 2022 Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Plutarch Award.
To register for this event, visit bit.ly/LitCocktail24.