The burgeoning fascination with genealogy, epigenetics, and the concept of inherited trauma over the past few years points to a desire to understand ourselves through our pasts, and create a narrative of our own lives. The rising popularity of paying to have your DNA tested to trace generations of migration may seem more primed to inspire science fiction but, increasingly, writers have been mining their family pasts to create deeply intimate personal narratives, using both fiction and nonfiction as a means to reckon with the troubling history of their lineages. Ann Leary was inspired by a shocking discovery about her grandmother to write The Foundling, a novel about a woman who takes a secretarial job at a medical institution under the guise that its purpose is to help women in danger, only to unravel its secret intention to be a eugenics program for women deemed unfit to reproduce. Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble traces the evolution of our sociological, cultural, scientific, and religious relationships with our ancestors alongside her research into her own family’s history, uncovering murder, mental illness, racism, and religious fanatacism along the way. Join Leary and Newton in conversation regarding these two fascinating texts, using literature as a tool to contend with personal history, and the circularity of the past.
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