She set out to research her genealogy-her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind.
Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family-and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves-in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” ( The Boston Globe).
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