Friends, it's been a while. How've you been, apart from... everything? Catch me up if you'd like.
If you don't remember why you're following me: I'm a writer. You might like my book, Ancestor Trouble, if you're interested in family history, genealogy, mental health, generational trauma, systemic harms, and spiritual practices around ancestors and our alienation from those practices in Western modernity. I was finishing it up at the end of the first Trump administration, and to be perfectly honest I viewed it in part at that time it as a kind of stealth self-help book for people who might be groping toward the same kinds of questions in a period where the world seemed to be moving backward.
Ancestor Trouble was called a book of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, the Boston Globe, Esquire, Garden & Gun, and more. It was a pick for Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club and a New York Times Editors' Choice selection, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize for a first book in any genre.
In a sense it's a memoir, and it's also broader than a pure memoir. On Bluesky, the religion professor Seth Shafer recently described it as "the most unexpected textbook I use [in my Death and the Afterlife class] because it shows very personally how the dead always have a relationship with us whether we know it or not. It's also got the best treatment of ancestor religion I've ever read." A review in the latest National Genealogical Society Quarterly characterizes Ancestor Trouble as fascinating, fun, engaging, and relatably meandering.
Here are some excerpts and related essays:
My Ancestors Enslaved Black People; Acknowledging that Matters, for Guardian US
A Doorway, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Medium
Learning About Ourselves From Genealogy, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Wall Street Journal
On My Father, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Esquire
On Uncovering Family Histories America Is Still Wresting With, an Ancestor Trouble excerpt, at Time
My Accused Witch Ancestor Was Also an Enslaver, at Medium
The seeds of the book were family history posts on my blog in the aughts, and a Harper's cover story, America's Ancestry Craze, in 2014.
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