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4 award-winning books to read with your book club

Feature by Julie Hale

Winner of the 2021 National Book Award for fiction, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book is a searing portrayal of the Black authorial experience. At the center of the novel is an unnamed Black author on his first book tour struggling to navigate the publishing industry and make sense of the modern world. His narrative is offset by chapters recounting the story of Soot, a young Black boy in the South. Poignant and often funny, Mott’s novel draws readers in as it scrutinizes race in American society and the power of storytelling.

Marlon James’ epic fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf is narrated by Tracker, a hunter with an acute sense of smell. Accompanied by a shape-shifter named Leopard and a band of misfit mercenaries, Tracker travels through a landscape inspired by African mythology and ancient history on a dangerous quest to find a lost boy. Hallucinatory and violent yet marvelously poetic, this first entry in James’ Dark Star trilogy won the 2019 L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction. There are an abundance of potential topics for discussion, such as James’ folkloric inspirations and Tracker’s unreliable narration.

Following the death of her aunt from an uncommon ailment called Chagas, or the kissing bug disease, Daisy Hernández decided to research the illness. She shares her findings in The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease. Hernández talked to physicians and disease experts throughout the United States, and her interviews with patients reveal the human cost of the American healthcare system’s inadequacies. Hernández displays impressive storytelling skills in this masterfully researched volume, which won the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.

In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado’s powerful chronicle of a toxic love affair, won the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction. In the book, Machado reveals that she fell hard for a magnetic, emotionally unpredictable woman who became abusive. In structuring her memoir, she draws upon various narrative devices and traditions (coming-of-age, choose your own adventure and more), and the result is a multifaceted, daring and creative portrayal of a deeply dysfunctional relationship.

Pick a guaranteed winner for your reading group.
NonfictionSocial Science

Beth Macy shines a light on the helpers who are making a difference in the opioid crisis

Interview by Alice Cary

After the publication of her landmark 2018 book Dopesick, which featured six years of reporting about how the opioid crisis affected families in her adopted hometown of Roanoke, Virginia, Beth Macy vowed to herself, “I’m not writing about this again.” Her physician feared Macy might have PTSD after bearing witness to so many tragic deaths, including that of a 28-year-old mother named Tess Henry, whom Macy had grown close to while reporting Dopesick and whose body was found in a Las Vegas dumpster on Christmas Eve 2017. Macy’s husband suggested that she should write about happy things this time, like food and gardening, while her late mother, who had advancing dementia at the time, advised her about “eight times a day” to “write a love story instead.”

Not surprisingly, Macy didn’t listen. Yet today she is feeling happy and hopeful, chatting by phone about Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis from her mountain cabin an hour outside of Roanoke. Midway through our conversation, she becomes even more ebullient, shouting, “Oh my God. I’m looking at an eagle!”

Macy explains that writing Raising Lazarus was a very different experience from writing Dopesick, and in some ways, it was healing. “I’m not writing about just death,” she says of her most recent book. “I’m mostly writing about helpers, as Mr. Rogers called them. I’m writing about people who are actually making a difference. It feels really good to give them a platform, a voice.” 

Read our starred review of ‘Raising Lazarus’ by Beth Macy.

One of the book’s many fascinating heroes is the Reverend Michelle Mathis of Olive Branch Ministries in western North Carolina, who uses the biblical story of Lazarus to encourage people to extend help rather than judgment to those with substance use disorder (SUD). Mathis “tells the story to get well-meaning Christians to check their blind spots,” Macy says. “Jesus does the miracle, but the people who are following him have to go in there and get their hands dirty. They have to roll the stone and unbind Lazarus.”

Blind spots play an important role in examining issues related to SUD. The opioid crisis is everywhere, but in rural areas it’s often hidden in plain sight—”literally,” Macy says, “right under the bridges you drive across.” She and the helpers she profiles in Raising Lazarus encourage an alternate approach to the war-on-drugs, “just say no,” victim-blaming approach that so many of us grew up with. “The idea that drug users are worthy human beings—that they are, in fact, equals—is harm reduction in a nutshell,” she writes. They need access to things like clean needles, hepatitis tests and buprenorphine, or “bupe,” an FDA-approved medication to treat opioid use disorder.

People with SUD also need simple things, such as casseroles, instead of stigma and reproach. “It doesn’t always smell like flowers, and you might get a little something on you,” Rev. Mathis says in the book. “But the people who are willing to work at the face-to-face level get to see the miracle and look it in the eye.” Many such solutions, Macy points out, “are kind of low-tech and high-touch,” and the good news is that they’re working. “That’s the view that America needs to see,” she says, “not just the dark but the miracles.”

“That’s the view that America needs to see, not just the dark but the miracles.”

Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy

The first time Macy visited a needle exchange program in Roanoke, “I just kind of had to take a breath and turn around and get a hold of myself,” she says. She thought of Tess Henry, who had verbalized a need for urgent care for people with SUD before she died. “She didn’t know what that meant, because she had never seen it,” Macy says, “but she knew it needed to be as easy as the urgent care center that first prescribed opioids for her.” Tess, she believes, would have loved this needle exchange and its welcoming, comfortable vibe. It’s run by a “sweetheart of a guy,” Macy says, who brings his two little white dogs with him to work and provides things like deodorant, food, computers and help with housing and job applications to anyone who needs it, in addition to clean needles.

Macy admits that she has at times struggled to forgive those with SUD, especially in the case of her father, whose substance was alcohol. As a result of his addiction, she grew up in poverty; he even failed to attend her high school graduation. Every now and then, she thinks, “Wow, I really didn’t have the experience of having a father.” But she also knows that he had an illness. “So in some ways,” she says, “I’m trying to figure all that out for myself too.”

Macy knows that she could have become addicted, too, if things had played out a little differently in her life. “I was a wild thing,” she says, “but in my small town, it was just marijuana and beer. I’m sure if everybody was doing [opioids], I would’ve wanted to get in on it too.”

“I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”

At that time, however, the Sackler family had yet to unleash the pain medication that would eventually cause the opioid epidemic: OxyContin. With fascinating detail, Raising Lazarus describes major players in the class-action lawsuit against this “cartel of the opioid crisis,” as Macy describes them. Paul Hanly, a high-profile litigator who led the legal fight against opioid makers and distributors, told Macy, “I’ve taken 500 depositions in my career, and I have never deposed a person whose ability to exhibit empathy is zero. . . . Compared to [Perdue Pharma chairman and president Richard Sackler], Donald Trump looks like Jesus Christ.”

Macy says she would love the chance to question the Sackler family herself, but only if they first took a truth serum. “They hid so much of it for so many years,” she says. “I think when the full truth comes out, it’s going to be even more shocking than it is now.”

Still, Macy wonders whether the Sacklers wish they could have done things differently—even though board member Kathy Sackler has already testified before Congress that they do not. “They started this thing that has hurt roughly a third of American families, and they’ve taken no responsibility for it,” she says. “I just want to hear them say they’re sorry.”

Author photo of Beth Macy by Josh Meltzer

The bestselling author of Dopesick reexamines opioid addiction, this time with a more hopeful view.
NonfictionSocial ScienceHistoryBlack History

Under the Skin

Review by Alden Mudge

Linda Villarosa grew up in a high-achieving Black family in a mostly white suburb of Denver. When she began writing about Black women’s health for Essence in the mid-1980s, her articles were all about self-help and self-improvement, based on the assumption that poverty and poor education were the reasons for detrimental health conditions among Black people.

But then she discovered that well-educated, upper-middle-class Black women were also having underweight babies and higher rates of maternal death than white women. She found herself wondering, “Why is the current Black-white disparity in both maternal and infant mortality widest at the upper levels of education? And what was it about our health-care system that exacerbated this problem?”

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation answers these questions and many more. In one of the most interesting chapters, Villarosa writes about “weathering,” a concept developed by Dr. Arline Geronimus, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Weathering is the idea that “high-effort coping from fighting against racism leads to chronic stress that can trigger premature aging and poor health outcomes.” It draws the throughline from systemic failure to a harmful bodily response.

Under the Skin audiobook image
Read our starred review of the audiobook for ‘Under the Skin.’

Villarosa, who now writes for The New York Times Magazine, explores many more aspects of American prejudice and health in this book. In a chapter recounting a visit to Appalachia to write about the addiction crisis among poor white people, she suggests that many of these people suffer from the debilitating effects of class discrimination, with similarly negative health repercussions. She examines myths about Black genetics—that Black people are less sensitive to pain than whites, for example—that persist within the medical community to the detriment of Black Americans. She looks at how racism in housing forces many Black families into environmentally hostile neighborhoods. And, based on her reporting, she offers several ideas for improving community health that she believes will change American health care for the better.

Under the Skin is wonderfully written. It’s not an inaccessible academic work or a polemic. Rather, its points are made amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences. The book also serves as a stake in the ground for Villarosa as she powerfully discloses what years of reporting have led her to understand: “The something that is making Black Americans sicker is not race per se, or the lack of money, education, information, and access to health services that can be tied to being Black in America. It is also not genes or something inherently wrong or inferior about the Black body. The something is racism.”

Linda Villarosa’s wonderfully written book makes stunning points about the health risks of racism amid moving narratives of real people’s experiences.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Corrections in Ink

Review by Sarojini Seupersad

By most measures, Keri Blakinger lived a charmed life. As the daughter of a successful lawyer and a schoolteacher, her upper-middle-class suburban existence seemed, from the outside, perfect. Her childhood was filled with loving parental support, academic success and a fierce pursuit of competitive figure skating that took her all the way to nationals. But when that pursuit ended in disappointment, Blakinger’s life came undone.

In her exceptional debut, Corrections in Ink, investigative journalist Blakinger reflects on an important decade of her life that took her from figure skating to drug addiction, to selling drugs and sex, to an arrest on a drug charge while she was a college student at Cornell University. She got clean during the almost two years she was imprisoned, but afterward she still had to grapple with the inhumanity of being behind bars.

Blakinger details the cruelties, big and small, that she endured while she was incarcerated. She also acknowledges that, as a white woman, she was in a position of privilege and that Black and brown people are treated far worse, get tougher sentences and have worse outcomes than their white counterparts. It is a sad and powerless position for anyone to be in, as the prison system is designed to slowly strip away one’s humanity. To hold on to her humanity, Blakinger had to find joy in unexpected places.

Corrections in Ink is written with deep insight and urgency, and Blakinger’s gripping insider knowledge and experience is supported by research, strong analysis and a blistering indictment of the criminal justice system. It’s this rare combination of personal narrative and reporting that makes Corrections in Ink such a singular reading experience.

Blakinger’s raw and important memoir isn’t only a drug recovery and success story. It’s a searing condemnation of our cruel and unjust project of caging human beings, a firsthand account of what this entails and a challenge not to look away from America’s flawed and punitive carceral system.

Keri Blakinger’s combination of personal narrative and reporting makes her debut memoir about her life in prison an exceptional, singular read.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

The Nineties

Review by G. Robert Frazier

The 1990s may be a decade often lamented for its generation of “slackers” and eternally epitomized in the TV series “Seinfeld” (frequently described as “a show about nothing”), but Chuck Klosterman has found a treasure trove of history, nostalgia and pop culture relics to explore in The Nineties (12.5 hours). Each chapter is devoted to a defining characteristic or experience of Generation X, from VHS tapes and Blockbuster video stores to the strange phenomenon dubbed “the Mandela Effect,” in which whole swaths of people remember things differently than the way they actually happened. Klosterman narrates the audiobook in an almost tongue-in-cheek fashion, with acclaimed voice actor Dion Graham reading the footnotes and quotations.

Klosterman discusses the ’90s with both the intimacy of someone who lived through the decade and the authority of the beloved pop culture commentator that he has established himself as through 12 previous books. The Nineties provides a fascinating, granular look at a defining period of history, and if you’re listening on your smartphone, you’ll connect even stronger with Klosterman’s examination of an era that marked the “end to an age where we controlled technology more than it controlled us.”

The Nineties provides a fascinating, granular look at a defining period of history, and author Chuck Klosterman narrates in an almost tongue-in-cheek fashion.
NonfictionAudioSocial Science

Atlas of the Heart

Review by Tami Orendain

Brené Brown invites listeners to get vulnerable in Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (8.5 hours). Drawing from her research and personal experiences, Brown offers a new framework for building healthy relationships by analyzing common emotions such as compassion, fear and anger.

Brown narrates this audiobook with gentleness and expertise, and when she speaks about serious topics, she is sincere without being somber. Because Atlas of the Heart is a highly visual book, she’s taken steps to ensure that the audiobook is just as engaging as the print edition, with extra examples and stories that are exclusive to the recorded version. This small touch is a microcosm of Brown’s earnest intentions as a writer and narrator.

Listening to Atlas of the Heart is like sitting down with a trusted mentor. With both humility and authority, Brown helps readers stay engaged and encouraged, even as her book dives into difficult, tender ideas. Tune in for a challenging and inspiring listen.

Because Atlas of the Heart is a highly visual book, Brené Brown assures listeners that she's taken steps to ensure that the audiobook is just as engaging, with additional stories exclusive to the recording.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoirMedicine

Health care with heart

Feature by Deborah Mason

As we age, most of us will experience a debilitating or life-threatening illness at some point. Two nonfiction books take an unflinching look at this reality while painting a compassionate picture of how we and our health care providers could approach illness and death with more empathy, honesty and courage.

Healing

Cover of Healing by Theresa Brown

Healing: When a Nurse Becomes a Patient is Theresa Brown’s searingly honest and deeply personal account of her experiences as a breast cancer patient. Brown, a registered nurse with a Ph.D. in English literature, has written and lectured extensively about the American health care system. As a former oncology and hospice nurse, Brown knew that patients often got a raw deal, but only after her own diagnosis did she realize how needlessly cruel that deal could be.

Brown has profound gratitude for her family, friends and medical team, who all supported her as she recovered, but she is also angry. She faced a host of necessary evils during her treatment, including invasive diagnostic procedures, painful surgeries and debilitating side effects from chemotherapy. But in a series of devastating vignettes, Brown also details the many unnecessary evils she endured in a system that favors profit over the needs of the patient: Diagnoses were delayed, questions left unanswered, test results undelivered. She was even forced to negotiate byzantine regulations on her own because her health care providers were stretched too thin to ensure that these basic duties were fulfilled effectively or graciously. Even though Brown was a seasoned health professional with extensive knowledge and professional contacts, she had to fight to be treated humanely. One can only imagine the obstacles less experienced patients must face every day.

Healing is both a moving memoir and a clarion call to action. When health care becomes a profit-making industry, dominated by hedge funds and corporate interests, we all lose. Instead, Brown argues, we must return to a system where meeting the patient’s needs—physical, emotional and social—is the priority.

★ The Day I Die

Cover of The Day I Die by Anita Hannig

In The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America, anthropologist Anita Hannig takes a different but no less passionate approach to her examination of death and dying in America. After becoming interested in how Oregon’s assisted dying law worked, Hannig embedded herself in a volunteer group that helps terminally ill patients take advantage of the law. She soon realized that the law, with its many hoops and barriers, could be like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s girl with the curl on her forehead. When it works, the law is very good. Hannig’s case studies of patients who have enough luck and resources to meet the demands of the statute demonstrate that assisted death can be, paradoxically, life-affirming. Autonomy can be restored to patients who have long been at the mercy of their diseases, and knowing when one will die can be an opportunity for reconciliation, reunion and gratitude.

But when things go bad, the law can be horrid. It is reasonable to have strict conditions surrounding assisted dying to ensure that the decision to end one’s life is freely made. But those conditions can have devastating effects upon patients who desperately want to die but cannot meet the requirements. Patients with ALS, for example, might lose their ability to communicate their assent before the deadline. Advanced Alzheimer’s patients are categorically denied access to assisted dying because they have lost the ability to fully understand their decision. Hannig rigorously details these and other situations in which people’s physical or mental deterioration, lack of resources or sheer bad luck result in a painfully prolonged life and terrifying death.

In her introduction, Hannig acknowledges the anthropologist’s dilemma: The act of observation is an imperfect tool for research, since it can change both the observer and the observed. However, it can also change the reader, since it is impossible to read Hannig’s book without being moved. Regardless of your stance on assisted dying, The Day I Die will make you reconsider how dying could and should be.

The personal stories in these nonfiction books set a more humane benchmark for patients and providers.
NonfictionSocial ScienceFamily & Relationships

Essential Labor

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Consider all the universal mundanities of caregiving: the endless feedings, diaper changes, cleanups, sleepless nights and confining days, not to mention all the laundry. What if, with the help of journalist, activist and mother Angela Garbes, we could radically reconsider the incredible value of this work? In Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Garbes swoops from the universal to the personal to the downright intimate, offering an all-encompassing vision of a more socially and economically just way of caring for one another that, de facto, would improve our individual and collective lives.

The author of the hybrid memoir Like a Mother, a 2018 NPR best book of the year, Garbes serves up her own experiences as a first-generation Filipina, daughter, wife and mother in her second book. She calls Part I of Essential Labor “A Personal History of Mothering in America” and uses it to delineate her social relationship to motherhood, including her own family’s complicated origins in the U.S., beginning when her parents emigrated from the Philippines in 1970. Part II, “Exploring Mothering as Social Change,” expands into the kinds of activism that mothering can and should inspire to create a more equitable world.

Garbes wants so much more for her mixed-race children than the racialized, gendered immigrant experience that her parents endured—yet there is more to mothering than personal circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic, Garbes says, changed how we care for each other, revealing that “mothering is some of the only truly essential work humans do.” She also identifies child care as a political issue—a kind of infrastructure for families that needs bipartisan government support.

At the same time that workplaces gave way to home “offices” during the pandemic, nursing homes became off-limits, schools and child care centers closed, and families were left with the work of finding other ways of caring for young people, elderly people and themselves. The myth of a self-sustaining family was no longer viable, Garbes observes; mothering needed the support of communities and multiple generations. The work of mothering, taking care of ourselves and others, became more essential than ever.

There is a great deal to digest here, and Garbes’ analyses will certainly resonate with people whose caregiving responsibilities increased during the pandemic. Yet by identifying the inherent power of mothering as a force for change, Garbes makes her message relevant to a broader audience. Indeed, as Essential Labor makes clear, all our fates are intertwined.

Angela Garbes swoops from the universal to the intimate as she offers a vision of mothering that would improve our individual and collective lives.
NonfictionSocial Science

Overdue

Review by Jessica Wakeman

Our memories of the library, like many other aspects of American life, are often sharply contoured by class. If you’re economically privileged, you may see libraries as places to stock up on the most up-to-date books or as public spaces for cultural events. If you’re economically disadvantaged or homeless, however, the public library may be the primary—or only—location where you can access bathrooms, running water, the internet and a modicum of safety.

Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library is just what it says in the subtitle: a reckoning. Former school and public librarian Amanda Oliver declares that she isn’t here for the “romanticization” of librarians and libraries. Instead, she wants readers to face the bitter truth. The history of libraries in America, like the history of America itself, is marked by racism and classism—although nowadays, inequality festers more through municipal neglect than outright discrimination. While working at several under-resourced libraries in Washington, D.C., Oliver saw this firsthand. For too long, libraries in America that are “easier to help—and better to showcase” have garnered plenty of energy and money from administrators. Everywhere else, librarians are on their own—and as Oliver vividly documents, they’re drowning.

Amanda Oliver, author of ‘Overdue,’ reflects on why librarians burn out and what effect this has on the health of our communities.

As a librarian at an elementary school that served primarily low-income students, Oliver quickly learned that her job was as much about performing the work of a social worker, without any social work training, as it was about books. At public libraries, Oliver’s work put her in daily contact with people experiencing homelessness, addiction, severe mental illness and a range of other crises, and she often found herself on the receiving end of verbal abuse and sexual harassment from library patrons. Oliver eventually left the profession, in part due to its toll on her own mental health.

Overdue is not an easy book to read for those of us who love or have romanticized libraries. It requires readers to confront the ways that America and its public institutions are failing low-income communities nationwide—but that’s exactly why it’s essential to read.

Former librarian Amanda Oliver quickly learned that her job was as much about performing the work of a social worker—without any training—as it was about books.
NonfictionSocial Science

You Sound Like a White Girl

Review by Kelly Blewett

Julissa Arce, who charted an unlikely course from banker to writer, doesn’t want to be seen as a model immigrant. Sure, now she has los papeles and owns a home, but she can’t help asking, “What is the real cost of success?” For her, it was not being able to visit her dying father in Mexico because her immigration proceedings were not yet complete. It’s reading textbooks that omit any mention of the roles Latinx people have played in American history. It’s boxes on the U.S. census that erase entire ethnicities and prompt many Latinx people to choose “White” as their race. In You Sound Like a White Girl, Arce argues that now is the moment for Latinx people to reject assimilation and its attendant misconceptions.

These misconceptions, what Arce calls “the lies we’re told,” concern whiteness, English and success, which are all presented as essential to American identity. In the face of this fallacy, Arce wants to recenter Latinx history, identity, culture and language within America. She has thought carefully about not only how assimilation has impacted her—prompting her to modify her name so that her white teachers could pronounce it more easily—but also how such erasures function on a larger scale, causing Latinx folks to miss out on histories that could empower and embolden them. For example, as a girl, Arce wanted to be a cheerleader in Texas. At the time, she was totally unaware of the history of Chicana cheerleaders in Texas or of student protests in 1968, during which students held up signs that read “Brown legs are beautiful.” Without these stories to ground her, she felt isolated among her white teammates. When she went back to her middle school to speak after the publication of her first book, My (Underground) American Dream, she told this story, hoping to speak many such histories back into existence for the next generation.

Ultimately, through these acts of reclamation—of history, language, identity and culture—Arce argues that the very definition of what it means to be an American can shift. On a Christmas trip to Mexico, Arce recalls asking her nephews what they pictured when she said “un americano.” They imagined “a tall white person with blond hair and green or blue eyes.” She replied, “What about me? I am a U.S. citizen. Am I American?” This question, intended to make her nephews think a bit more deeply about their assumptions, is a relevant one for anyone seeking to shed narrow notions of American identity in favor of something truer and more just.

By centering Latinx history and culture, memoirist and cultural critic Julissa Arce boldly challenges narrow notions of American identity.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Ancestor Trouble

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In 2014, the well-known literary blogger Maud Newton wrote a cover story for Harper’s Magazine titled “America’s Ancestry Craze.” Now, in her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, she significantly expands on that piece, blending a revealing family memoir with a well-researched and thoughtful exploration of heredity and genealogy.

Newton introduces a large cast of characters from her lineage, some of whom were accused of murder and witchcraft. The conflict-filled marriage of her parents—a father from whom she’s been estranged for two decades and who would welcome the return of slavery, and a mother who believes in demonic possession and once led a fundamentalist church in her living room—provides rich narrative material, as do Newton’s often moving reflections on her markedly different relationships with her Texas and Mississippi grandmothers.

Maud Newton, author of ‘Ancestor Trouble,’ shares how she’s working to acknowledge the sins of her ancestors.

In the most incisive and tough-minded chapters of the book, Newton confronts the twin “monstrous bequests” of her ancestors: their ownership of enslaved people and involvement with the dispossession of America’s Indigenous population. She was able to trace her father’s forebears’ slaveholding back to 1816, which she more or less expected. But in the process, she made the unpleasant discovery that there are also slave owners in her maternal lineage, and that she’s descended from Massachusetts settlers who expropriated the lands of native tribes through treachery and violence.

As absorbing as it may be, Newton’s family story is only one element of her account. Ancestor Trouble broadens into a much deeper excavation of the subject of ancestry that ranges widely across an abundance of topics, among them the allure and danger of websites like 23andMe and Ancestry.com and the spiritual practice of ancestor veneration. She also investigates controversies in cutting-edge DNA research, acknowledging that apparent scientific advances are not always unalloyed goods.

Newton’s family history is uniquely hers, but her book arms anyone who’s ever been tempted to visit their own ancestry in a serious way with a host of provocative questions to consider.

In her striking debut, Maud Newton blends a revealing family memoir with a well-researched and thoughtful exploration of heredity and genealogy.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMemoir

Maud Newton’s debut is much more than a conventional family memoir

Interview by Harvey Freedenberg

According to an article in the MIT Technology Review, by early 2019, more than 26 million people had added their DNA to the four leading commercial ancestry and health databases. That level of interest cries out for an in-depth examination of genealogy’s broad appeal, and Maud Newton gives us just that in Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.

Speaking by FaceTime from her home in Queens, New York, the red-haired and bespectacled Newton is relaxed and cordial as she sits in front of a wall of glass-enclosed bookshelves. She speaks thoughtfully but with evident passion about a project that had its genesis some 15 years ago, when she started researching her family on Ancestry.com. But it wasn’t until 2010, when she received her 23andMe DNA test results, that her interest in the subject took off. Even then, she admits, she was “puzzled by my obsession with it. I wasn’t really sure exactly what I was trying to get at.”

Read our starred review of Maud Newton’s ‘Ancestor Trouble.’

A 2014 cover story for Harper’s Magazine on “America’s Ancestry Craze” led to a book contract and launched Newton, a writer and former book blogger who briefly practiced law before her literary career began, on a long and sometimes circuitous path through subjects like the heritability of trauma and the spiritual importance of ancestors in various cultures. “As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited,” she says, “but I really wanted to do my best.” The broad reading list reflected in her book ranges from ancients like Aristotle and Hippocrates to the work of contemporary writers such as Dani Shapiro and Alexander Chee.

At the core of Ancestor Trouble is Newton’s complex and often difficult family story. She describes her birth as a “kind of homegrown eugenics project,” writing that her parents “married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together.” The union between her father, a Mississippi-born lawyer and unabashed racist, and her mother, a Texas native who later in life became a fundamentalist minister who conducted exorcisms in the family living room, lasted only 12 years but left Newton with a colorful, though at times painful, lineage to explore.

Among the most memorable characters in her family line are her maternal ninth great-grandmother, Mary Bliss Parsons, who faced multiple allegations of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, and her maternal grandfather, Robert Bruce, who reportedly married 13 times. (So far, Newton has only been able to document 10 marriages, though she’s still searching.) Another is Charley, Robert’s father, who was accused of murdering a man in downtown Dallas with a hay hook in 1916. He died in a Texas mental hospital, but Newton became so engrossed in his story that she purchased a tombstone to mark his previously anonymous grave.

“As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited, but I really wanted to do my best.”

For Newton, the most problematic aspect of her ancestry concerns her family’s connections with slavery and with efforts to expel Indigenous peoples from their native lands. On her father’s side, that history hardly came as a surprise; he was, after all, obsessed with the Confederacy. But Newton was dismayed to discover that some of her mother’s ancestors also enslaved people and participated in genocide against Native Americans. “It was an unpleasant surprise, but ultimately a healthy and useful one,” Newton says, “to recognize that it wasn’t possible for me to divide my family into the part that enslaved people and that I didn’t relate to as much, and the part that I related to more that didn’t have this history. It was on all the sides.”

Though her family history is rife with material, Newton wanted to write a book that was more than a conventional family memoir. “The only way I wanted to write it was if I could . . . look at it through these different lenses, both through my own family history and in the larger historical, sociological, scientific, philosophical and religious history context,” she says.

That broad perspective magnified Newton’s reservations about online DNA research websites like the ones that launched her investigation. “I am very skeptical and very concerned about the data those sites are collecting and the lack of control we have over what is done with that data,” she says. “And I also continue to use both of those sites regularly. I objectively think they’re highly problematic, and on a personal level, I continue to be seduced by the tools that they offer.”

“Making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”

Newton’s comprehensive approach also led her to explore different ancestor veneration practices, such as Tomb-Sweeping Day in China and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. As she studied these rituals throughout history and the world, she came to realize that “we in the contemporary West who do not venerate ancestors or minister to them in the afterlife are the aberration, not the other way around.” That intriguing and moving investigation, she says, provided her with “a spiritual connection now, a healthy connection to my ancestors, including to some of the ancestors who were problematic when they died, with whom I had difficult relationships in life.” In the end, she says, “it’s less important or interesting whether there’s some objective reality to this feeling that I have of connection to my ancestors. What’s important to me is the healing potential that this inquiry can have.”

Readers will connect with many aspects of Newton’s vivid story, but there’s one—what she calls “acknowledgment genealogy”—that she hopes will especially resonate. This encompasses, as she puts it, “personal harms that we can acknowledge within our own family or larger harms that relate to the systemic problems that we’re facing now as a country. . . . If each of us can feel a little more comfortable coming forward and recognizing these harms and thinking about them and feeling about them in a larger context,” she says, “we’ll move a lot further along as a country toward the kind of conversations and healing that we need.” Newton believes this and brilliantly reflects it in Ancestor Trouble. After all, she says, “making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”

Maud Newton author photo credit: Maximus Clarke

The essayist and critic has penned a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.
NonfictionSocial Science

Amanda Oliver considers what it costs librarians to be the saviors of society

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

We asked Amanda Oliver, author of Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library, a few questions about how libraries become overburdened, why librarians burn out, and what effect this has on the health of our communities.

You write that Overdue will “push directly against the romanticization of what libraries are and who they are for.” Why do people romanticize libraries?
I think now, maybe more than ever, we need hope. And libraries, at least as we commonly understand them, are symbols of that hope—that we can share; that we can provide free, community-based items and care and space; even that we still love, read and uphold books. But there are more accurate truths, which I dig into extensively throughout the book, that I think will ultimately lead us to a more realistic version of hope around, within and from libraries. 

Did you romanticize libraries yourself at any point?
My relationship to libraries has fundamentally, since childhood, been based in warm feelings toward them as safe havens and quiet spaces of comfort. I still love libraries. I still find them comforting and recognize that they can be safe havens. But I am always touched by the whys: Why do libraries provide so much in America? Why do so few institutions like them exist en masse? Why not look a little more closely and critically at them? I can’t, and don’t ever want to, look at libraries without the whys.

Overdue uses your experiences as a librarian in Washington, D.C., to address societal and structural issues that affect libraries nationwide. Did you consider interviewing other librarians and incorporating their experiences into the book as well?
I’m not sure people realize that many public library systems have clauses in their contracts about what you can and cannot say publicly while working for them. I’ve had many private, off-the-record conversations with librarians that I didn’t include in the book out of respect for their privacy and need for job security. In many of those conversations, librarians said things along the lines of “I can’t say this stuff while I still work for my library system.” Meanwhile, I knew I could say “this stuff” because I had left library work and didn’t intend to go back.

“Why do libraries provide so much in America? Why do so few institutions like them exist en masse?”

You write movingly about how you operated with empathy while working with patrons facing poverty, racism, substance abuse and other issues. It led you to feel empathy fatigue and burnout. What do you hope readers, whether or not they’re librarians, learn about that process of burning out?
It has always been very interesting to me what happens when I explain to people the toll that working as a librarian took on me. Even the most socially conscious and empathetic people I know sometimes find it bewildering. I think it is deeply ingrained in American work culture and ethic that we should work and not complain, especially in professions where you are serving vulnerable and underserved people. I know that this was part of why I burned out. The idea that I was overreacting, that I was too sensitive and not tough enough, that I wasn’t working hard enough—this sort of deep-rooted self-flagellation, in lieu of looking more closely and critically at the system(s) I was functioning within, didn’t help me, and it didn’t help the people I was serving.

My hope is that people will recognize that you can’t pour from an empty cup (no matter how much you want to) and you also shouldn’t be asked to—by an employer, a co-worker or, as it ultimately comes down to, the perverse, inhumane, unimaginative and oftentimes cruel systems of capitalism in this country. 

Early in Overdue, you explore how libraries in colonial America were for wealthy white men and how racial segregation in libraries continued until the late 20th century. Why was it essential for you to include this history?
This is a key factor in all of American history, and yet it often seems to go missing from the narrative around libraries. That it was almost entirely wealthy white men who funded and founded public libraries (and so much else) means this was who determined libraries’ earliest roots, policies, procedures and so forth. It’s impossible to look at where libraries are today without looking at where—and how, and by and for whom—they were created. It was especially important to me to establish that our segregated past wasn’t that long ago, and that racism and systemic inequalities today still actively impact library patrons and employees in a negative way.

Read our starred review of ‘Overdue’ by Amanda Oliver.

Helping professions (such as nurses, childcare workers, etc.) can be seen as “feminized” labor and treated with less respect compared to more male-dominated fields. Do you think, in general, librarianship is viewed as “feminized” labor? How do you believe that impacts how society treats libraries and librarians?
Yes, I think librarianship is often viewed as “feminized” labor, and historically as well as statistically, it is. Something like 30% of librarians are men, with an unequal proportion of them in leadership roles. There are also still pervasive stereotypes of librarians—as either shrewish, unpleasant women or “sexy” women in skirts and unbuttoned cardigans—that I find debasing. Any type of gender stereotyping, inequality and discrimination negatively impacts everyone, of all genders, in innumerable ways. At the library level, it’s another way of preventing progress and an accurate understanding of the profession.

What are some of the reactions you would like to see from library administrators and local governments in response to the issues you raise in Overdue?
I’d like to see a bit more honest reckoning—as the subtitle of the book implies. Which is to say, a bit more of those in power acknowledging mistakes and missteps as well as facing up to more realities and failures on an institutional level. I’d like to see local governments looking to libraries for guidance on how they can establish community supports and services—not necessarily as resources for information on this topic (which, of course, they are) but as living, breathing, working examples.

I also hope my book gives people in leadership or decision-making roles some genuine insight into what is being asked of librarians, the immense weight that carries and the potential tolls it can take. My hope is that we will see better, more conscious, caring and community-minded decisions being made in the future. I think public libraries have a real opportunity to implement and model better work environments and better ways of caring.

“I hope my book gives people in leadership roles some genuine insight into what is being asked of librarians, the immense weight that carries and the potential tolls it can take.”

You mentioned how you like to visit a library in every place you travel. Is there one library that you especially love—either for its design, its people or something you did, saw or read there?
I have a particular fondness for the Seattle Public Library’s main branch. It’s a beautifully designed building. I also still go back to my first library sometimes when I am visiting Buffalo, New York, because it’s full of many warm memories for me. 

Do you have plans for another book, and if so, can you tell us what it’s about?
I do! I’ll be attending a six-week writing residency this summer to focus on my second book, which is quite different from Overdue. I am a stylistic prose writer at heart, which is not what readers will see in Overdue but is something they can find in some of my essays. I’m quite excited to get back to writing that is meditative, experimental and not based in heavy research. The book is, loosely, about living in the desert, the idea of Home with a capital H and the many ways it shifts and fragments in a life.

Author photo of Amanda Oliver by Justin Danks

The debut author draws on her experience in the Washington, D.C., public library system to explore how libraries became Band-Aids for American inequality.

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