BookPage calls me a writer to watch, and says “Newton is a master at taking a complex, far-reaching topic and making it magnificently intimate.” Esquire’s Adrienne Westenfeld has named Ancestor Trouble one of the best books of the year. Powers for The Star Tribune, Mary Ann Gwinn for the Los Angeles Times, and Alix Christie for The Economist. Other reviews, largely positive, some with minor quibbles and some more mixed, are from Libby Copeland in The Washington Post, Kristen Martin for NPR, Jeff Calder for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Katherine A. 1 Brooklyn pick, and an Amazon editors’ pick. Other interviews and Q&As have run in The Dallas Morning News, Shondaland, Bloom, and The Rumpus, and I answered ten questions from Poets and Writers, talked books with Shelf Awareness, and did an early interview with Jeanna Kadlec.Īncestor Trouble is a New York Times pick, a Los Angeles Times pick, one of Vanity Fair’s “ seven books we couldn’t put down,” a CNN pick, a Vulture pick, a Wired pick, an Observer pick, a Bookshop book of the week, an Apple Books pick, a Lit Hub pick, a Vol. (Hi, Barbara!) Later this month I’ll have the honor of discussing Ancestor Trouble with Roxane Gay for her Audacious Book Club.īookPage ran a very nice profile of me by Harvey Freedenberg, who also praised the book in a starred review. I also got to visit Square Books before my discussion on unhappy families with Liz Scheier, moderated by Lyn Roberts, for the Oxford Conference for the Book, where I met a cousin who realized we were distant cousins while sitting in the audience, a very Mississippi experience. You can watch my conversations with Maaza Mengiste at Books Are Magic (launch, live in person, 3/29), Alexander Chee for the Mark Twain House (4/1), Casey Cep for the New England Historic Genealogical Society and Porter Square Books (virtual, 4/4), and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers for Magic City Books (virtual, 4/5). I have discussed the book on NPR’s All Things Considered, the New York Times Book Review podcast, Miwa Messer’s Poured Over podcast for Barnes & Noble, Maris Kreizman’s The Maris Review podcast, Ethan Nichtern’s The Road Home podcast, and more. (“The stories we tell ourselves about our ancestors have the power to shape us, in some ways nearly as much as our genetics do.”) And today Time runs an adapted excerpt on my mysterious great-great aunt Maude Newton, who turned out to have been a writer, but… not the kind I would have hoped. (“I have loved my father, and I have feared him, but I have never understood him.) The Wall Street Journal features an excerpt this weekend. Ancestor Trouble was NPR’s Book of the Day yesterday, alongside Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts.Įsquire published an adapted excerpt. The New York Times review by Kerri Arsenault is a dream (“extraordinary and wide-ranging,” “a literary feat”), as are reviews by Lorraine Berry for The Boston Globe (“beautiful and complexly nuanced,” with “memoir parts read like a suspense novel”), Colin Dickey for The New Republic (“does what all truly great memoirs do: It takes an intensely personal and at times idiosyncratic story and uses it to frame larger, more complex questions about how identity is formed”) , and Lesley Heiser for the Los Angeles Review of Books (“great beauty, poignancy, and power”). She was as sharp and funny as she was soft and wise…and no matter how long this world continues to spin, there will be only one Betty White.Ancestor Trouble is out in the world! If you follow me on social media or receive my newsletter, you may have heard plenty about it by now, but if not, here are some highlights.
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She actually treated me like an equal in the comedy gurrrl world.
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She treated me like we were in the same club or something. She answered every question, acted very shocked at…every word out of my mouth, which was mandatory. Betty legit treated my mom like a friend. We surprised Maggie, so when Betty shows up… at Sizzler Senior Early Bird Special, my Mom about fell OUT! And I got to spend the day on film and off camera, with my mom and Betty White. “Betty, who was gracious enough to be a guest star on the episode of “Kathy Griffin My Life on the D List”, where we get my mom Maggie a play date with Betty White, was a bucket list memory, touching and hilarious at the same time. A party at which she ordered a vodka and a hotdog and stayed til the bitter end.” - Seth Meyers, on Twitter “RIP Betty White, the only SNL host I ever saw get a standing ovation at the after party. I bet there’s hundreds of us who she helped over the years.” - Nancy Meyers, on Instagram What an enormous thing to do for another person.
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She was the first person who made me believe I could be a writer. “Too much sadness! I posted once how she changed my life. Now you know the secret.” - Ryan Reynolds, on Twitter She managed to grow very old and somehow, not old enough.