Sheltering: Danielle Trussoni on Trapped Women and Anxiety Sweaters
On this episode of Sheltering, Danielle Trussoni speaks with Maris Kreizman about her new gothic novel, The Ancestor, which revolves around a woman finding out she is a member of an aristocratic family in Italy, and who ends up getting trapped in the family’s estate. From there she enters a world of dark family secrets, gets caught up in the mysteries of human genetics, and carries the burden of family inheritance. Trussoni and Kreizman discuss the long history of humanity, this moment in time being an impetus for change, and big, cozy sweaters. Please purchase The Ancestor online from your local bookstore or through Bookshop.
From the episode:
Maris Kreizman: The thing that I most empathized with Bert (the protagonist) about, is—and of course her situation is way more extreme than mine or yours—but the rhythms of her old life just kind of start drifting away as she is trapped in the estate and becomes more and more embroiled with her family.
Danielle Trussoni: Everything unravels—not just the rhythms of the day, she’s sleeping in the day, awake at nights, wandering the castle… but also the rhythms of who she thought she was as a person, namely, who her family was. But all of it explodes in this big way. The question I was interested in asking in this book was, who are we when our ancestry is stripped away? Who are we when we find all these cultural identifications that we used to create our personality, our rituals, our family connections—it’s all kind of invalidated in a way.
