My Grandfather's House

Tracing his ancestry back 500 years, PNBA book award-winner Robert Clark (Mr. White's Confessions) maps a legacy of religious belief, disbelief, and faith that mirrors his own spiritual quest. Although he speaks to his recent re-entry into the Catholic Church (the original church of his 500-year-old ancestors), Clark has not written a predictable "I once was lost but now I'm found" autobiography. Rather, he examines a familiar English-American religious legacy. "Like my forebears, I have been variously, and sometimes simultaneously, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, a Transcendentalist, an agnostic, and an atheist," Clark explains in the introduction to the book. Using his own journey of doubt and faith as the narrative framework, Clark weaves in the religious stories of his ancestors. We meet the Clark family members as inquisitors during the rein of Henry VIII, as Puritan settlers, as accusers in witch trails, and as cohorts of Emerson and Thoreau. Clark has great command over his ancestors' stories, his own story, and his story-telling ability. As a result, he has pulled this ambitious autobiography together in a way that is historically informative, consistently entertaining, and personally meaningful. Deftly and often humorously, he helps us see how our ancestors' religious conversions, confusions, and conquests often reflect our own. --Gail Hudson



Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography

In the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, Robert Clark tells the story of his return to the Catholic Church through the prism of the religious history of his ancestors. Intertwining their experiences as Catholics in late-medieval England, as Puritan settlers in 17th Century New England, and as 19th Century New England transcendentalists with his childhood in an Episcopalian boarding school and later conversion to Roman Catholicism, Clark presents not only a memoir but a testament of faith.