At times while working on my book over the years, I would become resentful of it, as if it had its own expectations, as if the draft itself were insisting I recount the entire history of genealogy in the United States or offer a dissertation on genetics. Ugh, now I have to write this boring part, I would think. I would spend a few days in active rebellion against this directive that I imagined the book was imposing.
Then I would realize: this is my book! There are no rules! I can write it however I want! Also, I would…
At the height of her exorcism obsession in the early 1980s, my mom claimed to see demons everywhere. They coiled around drivers who cut her off, perched on the shoulders of snobbish department store shoppers, floated above strangers walking down the road. Nearly everyone who didn’t agree with my mom was possessed, as she told it, from secular news anchors to the teachers at my fundamentalist school, who were the wrong kind of Christian. …
Over time, I’ve been drawn to ancestor-focused spiritual practices. At first my interest was theoretical. Recently these kinds of practices have become important to me.
This development, like my family, is complicated. I grew up a doubting Christian. My mom started a Hallelujahful church in our living room, and my father, though also born-again, went to a Presbyterian church and was mortified by hers. I attended a fundamentalist school, with yet another spin on the gospel. It was a lot of Jesus. Ultimately, I reacted by becoming a devout agnostic but fearing a future religious conversion.
In my other life I do just as my parents want.
My parents didn’t agree about who I should or would turn out to be, and maybe that’s the reason I ended up disappointing each of them and going my own way. My sister and I often have this conversation: would one or both of us have wound up being who they wanted if they’d envisioned the same unthinkable path rather than contradictory ones? If we’d been brainwashed with a consistent world view? If so, hard as it was to be stuck between the two and required to pay lip service to both, I’m glad their visions were unaligned.
“Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered,” my father, a tax lawyer, always said. I was still in elementary school when he started teaching me about his work, how he took provisions intended to impose tax on a particular business arrangement and found ambiguities that could be interpreted to allow his clients to do what they wanted and keep their money. I remember walking to church with him one Sunday as he explained the advantages of structuring a business as an S rather than a C corporation. …
by Maud Newton
Last year started with fluey nightmares about mice. I dreamed of mice used in research to benefit humans: “frantic” mice, for studying anxiety; “Methuselah” mice, known for longevity; and mice with human liver cells and brain cells and tumor cells. I also dreamed of mice that, as far as I know, exist only in my mind — mice with human lungs, brains, or hearts growing out of their bodies to replace our worn-out organs.
If you’ve been on the internet for a while, you’ve probably seen that photo of a lab mouse with a human ear jutting…
by Maud Newton
I’m writing a book on deadline and keeping my job, so most of my day goes to work of one kind or another. Often I tell myself that I can’t spare the time to meet friends for dinner, or to go to a museum or a party or reading. Sometimes I even call in to therapy. And yet, on occasion, on those very same days I’m supposedly too busy to go out, I spend several hours clicking around to random stuff online. “It would be one thing,” I was telling my husband a couple months ago, “if…
When visiting your family becomes a chore
The last time I stayed with my father in Miami over the holidays, I made the mistake of thinking he was lonely. I had a bad habit of trying to decode his emotional state from external markers, in this case his threadbare green bathmat. Part of a towel set my parents acquired when I was seven or so, it had been in a sad state for more than a decade, but on my most recent visit the previous winter, it was covered with holes, actually disintegrating. Each morning before work, my father stepped out of the shower and…
A Miami Noir love story. Part 2
Some months later, I married her. It happened as suddenly as our first dinner. I didn’t really think about it beforehand. We were out on a Monday night. She’d finished her business early, so we went to a restaurant in a mirrored strip mall down on U.S. 1. On the walls hung fake road signs and other boilerplate knick-knacks. The menu listed an array of fried foods. Seven weak American beers were on tap.
Before we ordered, I asked her, “How would you feel about getting married?”
She just said, “Okay.”
“Okay, now? Or okay in the future?”
“We could…
A Miami Noir love story. Part 1
Our first meeting was a second-rate noir film: curt, sexy, infused with the suggestion of violence, ultimately mystifying. As she walked through the door, her long red dress fluttered in the shock of air conditioning. Heels pushed her calves into high, tanned knots. A gold revolver charm hung between her breasts, right where I wanted my face to go. This wasn’t the kind of girl you generally met at Wolf’s. The other guys were staring, and even Patience, the bartender, a pretty, worn-out blond we’d all spent the past eight years hitting on, perked up and smoothed her hair a…
Maud Newton
Writer and reader. Book about ancestors coming from Random House, 2022. Opinions mine.
