Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. You know, it always struck me as a little unfair that stories about kids and teens who grow up and find themselves or whatever have their own name, you know, a Buildings Roman. I don't know, maybe it's just the 30-something in me that's just like, listen, adults got to figure themselves out too, and it isn't a walk in the park. In a bit, we'll hear from acclaimed author Jumboli Hiri and her book, Whereabouts, in which its central character spends a lot of time, alone, and tries to figure out her place in the world. But there's another way to find yourself too, and that's to

interrogate your own past, you know, find out who the people you came from really are. That's

what Maude Newton did for her memoir, Ancester Trouble, A Reckoning and Reconciliation. What she found

wasn't great. But she talks to NPR's Ari Shapiro about the responsibility she feels to make up for her lineage.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of

real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and

methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone's family tree has some

gnarled branches. In the author Maude Newton's past,

there are ancestors who committed violence, extremism, racism, and worse. Rather than shove that

inheritance under the bed in a locked box, she excavates it in her new memoir, Ancester Trouble.

Maude Newton, welcome to all things considered. Thank you so much for having me.

Where do you think your impulse to confront the darkness in your family's past rather than push it out of sight comes from?

You know, because I grew up with a father who was very explicitly racist, I didn't really have the option that a lot of people had to sort of ignore those histories in my family.

When you say explicitly racist, he thought you shouldn't watch Sesame Street because it showed black and white kids playing together.

He thought slavery should not have ended. I mean, this is really extreme. Yeah,

I mean, he was a very explicit white supremacist. He literally defended slavery and felt that it was a

benevolent institution that was working for everyone until Northern Ble bleeding hearts got involved. So when you grow up

with someone like that, you have to have a relationship to it. And luckily my mother was not

on the same page. And I grew up in Miami.

So it wasn't an environment like the place where he grew up in the Mississippi Delta in the middle of the last century, where these kinds of ideas were probably more prevalent.

And yet I could imagine some people upon reaching adulthood saying, well, thank goodness I'm done with that and running as far away from it as they could, instead of, hmm, what other skeletons might be in this closet?

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