![]() Still, the meeting of her parents’ lines in Maud inspired an anxiety that she could not shake a fear that she would replicate their damage. Their divorce, when it came, was a relief. He tried in vain to control Maud’s mother, a whirlwind of charisma and passion given to feverish projects: thirty rescue cats, and a church in the family’s living room where she performed exorcisms. Maud’s father, an aerospace engineer turned lawyer, was a book-smart man who extolled the virtues of slavery and obsessed over the “purity” of his family bloodline, which he traced back to the Revolutionary War. ![]() Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated through Maud’s maternal lines, to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook and died in a mental institution. ![]() Her mother’s father, who came of age in Texas during the Great Depression, was said to have married thirteen times and been shot by one of his wives. ![]() Maud Newton’s ancestors have vexed and fascinated her since she was a girl. An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her wildly unconventional Southern family–and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves. ![]()
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