Ancestor Trouble received a starred review from Kirkus! “The current wave of interest in genealogy, heredity, family history, and responsibility for past injustices crescendos in a comprehensive work combining personal narrative and reporting,” the reviewer says. “Exhaustively researched, engagingly presented, and glowing with intelligence and honesty.” ⭐️ This part made me laugh out loud in recognition: “These ruptures seeded a project . . .
Next June will mark twenty years since I first blogged, on a Blogspot site, on impulse. That day I figured I’d tire of the blog, that it would quickly become one of my many abandoned writing practices.
The days are growing shorter, the trees on the land across the way will soon shed the last of their leaves, and I have been reading the poems of W.S. Merwin and the fiction of Lauren Groff, and teaching myself how to write essays again.
Over the years I worked on Ancestor Trouble, All Hallows’ Eve and Samhain became important to me. As a kid, I wasn’t allowed to celebrate Halloween, on the theory that it was demonic, so developing a tenderness and receptivity to what this time of year probably meant to my ancestors centuries ago took a long time. I’m filled with particular . . .