Contemporary Authors

• Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging One World (New York, NY), 2017

1. Futureface : a family mystery, an epic quest, and the secret to belonging LCCN 2017038006 Type of material Book Personal name Wagner, Alex, author. Main title Futureface : a family mystery, an epic quest, and the secret to belonging / by Alex Wagner. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, NY : One World, [2017] Projected pub date 1803 Description pages cm ISBN 9780812997941 (hardback) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Wagner

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  Alex Wagner
  Alex Wagner (MSNBC) filesl.j.jpg
  Wagner in December 2011
  Born Alexandra Swe Wagner
  November 27, 1977 (age 40)
  Washington, D.C., U.S.
  Residence Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York[1]
  Citizenship United States
  Alma mater Brown University
  Occupation Television show host, writer
  Spouse(s) Sam Kass (m. 2014)
  Children 1
  Parent(s) Tin Swe Thant
  Carl Wagner
  Website MSNBC: Now With Alex Wagner
  Alexandra Swe Wagner (born November 27, 1977) is an American journalist and author. She is the co-host of The Circus on Showtime[2] and the author of FutureFace: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging (One World/Random House). She is also a contributor for CBS News and a contributing editor at The Atlantic[3][4]. Previously, she was the anchor of the daytime program Now with Alex Wagner (2011-2015) on MSNBC. From November 2016 until March 2018, she was a TV co-anchor on CBS This Morning Saturday. She has also been a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine since April 2016.[5]

  Contents
  1 Early life and education
  2 Career
  3 Political views
  4 Personal life
  5 Books
  6 References
  7 External links
  Early life and education
  Alex Wagner was born and raised in Washington, D.C. Her mother, Tin Swe Thant, is an immigrant from Rangoon, Myanmar (Burma), who became a naturalized U.S. citizen before attending Swarthmore College.[6] Her father, Carl Wagner, from Lansing, Iowa, was of Luxembourgish and Irish descent. He was a prominent Democratic Party political consultant who co-chaired Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.[7][8] She attended Woodrow Wilson High School[9] and graduated from Brown University in 1999, having studied art history and literature.[1][10] Wagner was raised Roman Catholic.[11]

  Career
  Wagner has worked as the cultural correspondent for the Center for American Progress.[12] From 2003 to 2007, she was editor-in-chief of The Fader magazine, covering music and cultural movements from around the world.[13] She also served as executive director of Not On Our Watch Project, an advocacy organization focused on mass atrocities and human rights violations.[13]

  Wagner then became the White House correspondent for Politics Daily, a political news magazine under AOL News.[13] She moved to The Huffington Post after it was acquired by AOL.[14]

  As an analyst on MSNBC, Wagner appeared on Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.[15]

  On November 14, 2011, Wagner began hosting Now with Alex Wagner weekdays (originally at noon ET, but later at 4 PM ET).[16] On July 30, 2015, MSNBC President Phil Griffin announced that the series had been cancelled in an effort to transition the network's daytime programming to more breaking news reporting and less political commentary and opinion. The next day the program aired its final episode. MSNBC later announced that Wagner would host a weekend program, but those plans were later abandoned.

  On April 26, 2016, The Atlantic announced that Wagner was leaving MSNBC to join the magazine as a senior editor. In addition to writing for The Atlantic, Wagner would moderate events with AtlanticLIVE and help with developing video and TV projects with The Atlantic Studios.[5]

  In November 2016, Wagner replaced Vinita Nair on CBS This Morning Saturday.[17] March 17, 2018 was her last appearance on CBS This Morning Saturday as she confirmed she would be leaving that show to co-host The Circus for Showtime, replacing Mark Halperin.[18] She remains a correspondent for CBS News.

  Political views
  She has described herself as progressive[19]. On matters involving Israel, she believes that there is an element of "trepidation that inhibits a robust discussion about Israel in the American media" due to fears of being falsely slurred as an anti-Semite.[20]

  Personal life
  On August 30, 2014, Wagner married former White House nutrition policy advisor and assistant chef Sam Kass in a ceremony held at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a restaurant in Pocantico Hills, New York.[21] The wedding was attended by then U.S. President Barack Obama and his family, as Kass is a family friend of the former president.[21][22] In 2017, Wagner gave birth to their son, Cy.[23]

  Books
  In April 2018 Futureface, her book about her Burmese-American ancestry was published.[18]

• The Cut - https://www.thecut.com/2018/03/political-journalist-alex-wagner-interview.html

  HOW I GET IT DONE
  MARCH 26, 2018
  11:00 AM
  How I Get It Done: CBS News Contributor Alex Wagner
  By
  Hope Reese
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  “I have like seven different jobs, basically,” the journalist and political commentator Alex Wagner told me. Chiefly, she’s a contributor to CBS News, a contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine, and a co-host of The Circus: Inside the Wildest Political Show on Earth, Showtime’s political docuseries on the drama unfolding in Washington, airing on April 15. Her forthcoming memoir Futureface, about her Burmese-American ancestry will be published by Penguin Random House in mid-April. On top of that, Wagner and her husband Sam — former White House chef for the Obamas — have an 8-month-old baby at home. Here’s how she gets it done.

  On an early-morning commute:
  If I’m at CBS, depending on whether I am filling in for Gayle [King] or Norah [O’Donnell] or if I have a piece on the air, I get up as early as 4 a.m. or as late as 5:30–5:45 a.m. CBS sends a car to pick me up in the West Village. Sometimes I’ll call an Uber or a Juno if there’s a problem with the car — or if I get into a fight with the local traffic police, which has happened twice!

  On reading in the makeup chair:
  If I’m presenting a piece, sometimes I’ll stop in the tracking booth to fix a tracking line or something — then it’s straight to the hair-and-makeup chair where the wizards get me camera-ready. We’ve gotten to a place where it can all be done in about 20 to 25 minutes, and that’s mostly because I keep chopping my hair shorter and shorter, so there’s just less work and I have a fairly standard look on camera. It is critical that the makeup get applied, but we try not to do too much.

  If I’m filling in on CBS’s morning show, there’s a lot of reading. There’s reading in the makeup chair, there’s reading on set — I’m constantly digesting information and getting prepared with the news of the day. I live in a perpetual state of reading, constantly looking at Twitter, news articles, news roundups.

  I need carbohydrates, because bread is the source of all life.
  On breakfast:
  I try and eat breakfast at the time that everybody else is eating breakfast — even though I’ve been up for many more hours than most normal people have been. I eat breakfast regularly around 9 or 10, lunch around like one o’clock and dinner around seven o’clock. I try and have some protein of some kind, maybe some yogurt or a hard-boiled egg. I need carbohydrates, because bread is the source of all life. I don’t think that’s scientifically true, but it is nutritionally true for me. A nice piece of toast with a lot of butter is a very good way to start your day. I do not drink caffeine. Alex Wagner caffeinated — well, it’s a national security concern! So I drink decaffeinated black tea and decaffeinated coffee, which makes me a sucker, but it’s just what needs to happen.

  On multiple jobs:
  I’m constantly juggling — I’m writing for The Atlantic, doing correspondent work at CBS in addition to my anchoring schedule, and with the book coming out I’m doing a lot of extra writing extensions of the book. On days when I’m not doing CBS, I start my day like a normal human being around 6:30 in the morning. I work out at the gym, then I come to the office and drink coffee out of a paper cup like everybody else. It just depends on what day of the week it is.

  On her scheduling system:
  I’m remarkably organized for someone who does not have a dedicated personal assistant and only uses iCal. I have an elaborate color-coded system that only occasionally works. I somehow keep it together — maybe I’m truly organizing it in my lizard brain. I’m always very fascinated by people who don’t know what their two o’clock or their 3:30 appointment is, they just know they have something. I know exactly what my day is like. And I calibrate everything from my footwear to my eyeliner based on what’s going to be happening for the rest of the day.

  On The Circus:
  I’m going to basically be on the road Monday through Friday for six weeks. For one episode, I did five states in one day, which was totally insane. We’re basically responsive to whatever is happening in the news. That will likely find us in Washington for some part of the next season, but we’ll be very focused on the midterms as well. You’ll see us traveling all over the country to key Senate and House races. It’s going to be a lot of early-morning flights, it’s going to be a lot of me eating string cheese sticks for breakfast instead of warm butter toast, it’s going to be putting on a lot of my own under-eye concealer and eyeliner in the airport bathrooms. It’s going to be a lot of hustle, but I’m really looking forward to it.

  On evenings:
  I just had a baby, so I try and get home around six even if that means putting the baby down and then getting back on the computer to look at final edits or something. I’m there every night to put him down unless I’m on the road, which is really important to me. We have an amazing caregiver, a nanny who helps us out every day and she’s wonderful, but we also are in this to be parents, so we try and spend some quality time with him.

  Mealtime preparation is done on a day-by-day basis for the most part. Sam and I are so excited to eat that in the morning we’ll check in and say “Okay, what do you want to have for dinner?” Each dinner is an event. Sam will start prepping while I’m giving the baby a bath. We have a lot of vegetable-heavy meals, just because we’re trying to be responsible about meat eating — which isn’t to say that we don’t love a good steak every now and then.

  We eat around 7:30 to 7:45. We always have a nice glass of wine and talk about what we did during the day. Then we watch some delicious television. Right now, we’re watching Mindhunter and Billions. I try and get in to bed by 10 or 10:15 at the latest. I need more sleep than the average bear — a fact I happily admit. Gayle King is my hero, and I wish I could get four hours of sleep and be articulate, but I can’t.

• CBS News - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-wagner-futureface-finding-belonging-identity-as-american/

  CBS NEWS April 17, 2018, 1:00 PM
  Alex Wagner chronicles her search for belonging in "Futureface"
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  When CBS News' Alex Wagner was 12 years old, she had a "revelation" at a diner.

  "My dad had gone to the restroom, and I was asked by the line cook, 'Are you adopted?' And it was the first time I thought, 'Oh, wait a second, maybe everyone else doesn't see me as generically American as I understand myself to be," Wagner said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning."

  The only child of a Burmese mother and American father, whose roots trace back to Ireland and Luxembourg, the CBS News correspondent said she grew to become "this kind of exotic, hapa, 'futureface.'"

  "It was exciting and interesting and fun. But at a certain point, especially as I got older, I wanted – that felt too rootless. I wanted meaning," Wagner said. "I wanted to find a sense of belonging and identity."

  futureface.jpg
  Raised in a predominately white community, she said she identified more with "white culture," but she started to question: "Where is the Burmese side of my history? Where is that made manifest?"

  So she set out on a quest, she said, to dig into her family history. She chronicles her search from Burma to Luxembourg for answers in her new book, "Futureface: A Family Mystery, An Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging."

  "I think all Americans, especially right now, want to find themselves in the American story. We're so fractured as a country. There is such a question about identity, who belongs here, what is the immigrant story, and how does it dovetail with the American story. That's a fundamental question right now, right? And I wanted to find out what kind of American am I, which means who were my American forefathers?" Wagner said.

  She said she found that "a lot is lost when you immigrate to America."

  "That is partly by necessity but also because we like to exfoliate the bad parts of our story. And what I did was go back to the homelands and find the ugly parts of the story and write about them because I think part of becoming whole is accounting for all the sins and all the warts and all the fissures that are part of everybody's story."

  She said as immigrants, people leave things that are broken in their own countries.

  "We didn't just arrive here on American shores virtuous, perfect immigrants, virtuous new citizens of a country. We had our own baggage. And part of this moment I think is reconciling that American baggage," she said.

  And in America, a "salad bowl" nation where different individuals and ingredients come together, "the question is, how does that all coalesce?"

  "We're all so different. We all taste and look and smell and sound and believe different things. How do we make a democracy out of that?" Wagner said.

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/04/24/605011428/in-the-new-face-of-america-journalist-alex-wagner-saw-herself

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  In 'The New Face Of America,' Journalist Alex Wagner Saw Herself
  7:59
  DOWNLOAD
  TRANSCRIPT
  April 24, 20184:56 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Ailsa Chang 2017 square
  AILSA CHANG

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  Alex Wagner is a co-host of The Circus on Showtime and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Above, she speaks at the 69th Writers Guild Awards on Feb. 19, 2017, in New York City.
  Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
  In 1993, Alex Wagner saw a familiar face on the cover of Time magazine: It was a computer-generated picture of a multiethnic woman who reminded her of ... herself.

  Wagner's father is white and from the Midwest; her mother is from what was then Burma. And after reading the Time story on "The New Face of America," Wagner, then a teenager, decided to embrace her identity as a "futureface."

  "I liken it to sort of thinking you were a pigeon and then finding out you were a toucan," says Wagner, now a journalist. "It was like this thing that no one else had, this 'futureface.' But as I got older, I felt the weightlessness of that. And I wanted to know what grounded me."

  Wagner was filled with questions about where she belonged, which family stories were myths and which stories were left untold. Her new book, Futureface, is her attempt to find answers about her ancestry.

  "In the initial stages, I sort of started talking to family members, and they would tell me these stories," Wagner says. "And inevitably — we all find this — there were snags in those stories, little kind of asides that didn't make sense. And I pulled them, and that's really what the book is about."

  Interview Highlights

  Time's "The New Face Of America" issue was released Nov. 18, 1993. Wagner remembers seeing the cover as a teenager and embracing her identity as a "futureface."
  Ted Thai/Time magazine
  On her mother's and grandmother's memories of home

  Burma — and let me be clear, it's also known as Myanmar — and the reason a lot of Burmese and Burmese exiles call it Burma: It's a form of political resistance to the ruling military junta.

  The stories of Burma were always redolent with the scent of frangipani blossoms, and, you know, these incredibly gauzy memories about life in the aftermath of British colonialism, which weren't ... political stories. But they were stories about this just incredibly romantic way of life. My grandmother would talk about having bananas at teatime and carrying palm fronds when the monsoon rains came, and I accepted all of those stories because they were like poetry. But they weren't grounded in any particular reality, and they didn't answer the fundamental question, which was, "If life in Burma was so good, why did we leave?"

  On fact-checking her family's history

  As I did the research talking to people in my family — namely my grandmother, who had the greatest wealth of stories — I also started cross-referencing some of the things she was telling me about with historical documents, which is not what we often do in the realm of family histories. And then, of course, I traveled to Burma. I went to the Burmese archives, which was a comedic endeavor if ever there was one. There was nothing, really — not much of an archives.

  But what I did discover is that some of these sort of petty bigotries that were made manifest in family stories tied back to a very violent and virulent strain of Burmese nationalism that I had never even considered. ... In many ways, the Burmese upper class like my grandmother turned a blind eye to Indian massacres that happened in Burma ... at the time my family lived there.

  Futureface
  Futureface
  A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging

  by Alex Wagner

  Hardcover, 352 pages purchase

  On her father's side of the family and the "White Immigrant Origin Story"

  The White Immigrant Origin Story is effectively the American origin story, which is that, "We immigrants from Western Europe left the Old World, we started anew, and because of our hard work and divine providence, we made it in America." ...

  For the most part, the White Immigrant Origin Story either glosses over huge parts of reality and history — or is just a lie. And in the case of my grandfather, what we knew about him was built on falsehoods. And as I went back to Luxembourg and did intense genealogical detective work to find out who this person was, I realized that he bore no resemblance to the person we thought he was. And that was important because the heroism that is a fundamental part of the White Immigrant Origin Story, I think, can be exclusionary. And what I'm trying to do in this book, I think, is to find a more inclusive narrative when we talk about America.

  On finding her own community

  I think we do a lot of work in this day and age focusing on the future and on the past. And we hope that somehow, we'll find something in both places. But what I realized through all of this digging through, the place where you can really find yourself is, of course, right here, and that we don't invest enough in the present. When we think of community, we think of some sort of nebulous, faraway group of people rather than the men and the women who touch our daily lives. And I realized that my people basically had been with me all along. ...

  And I think as simple as that is, it's changed my worldview. It's changed the way I think of every single day. I began this book really feeling lonely and really plumbing the depths of my existential despair, but I came out of it feeling like I was part of a fabric that was pretty tightly woven.

  Sam Gringlas and Melissa Gray produced and edited the audio story. Sydnee Monday adapted it for the Web.

• MPR News - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/04/24/in-new-book-alex-wagner-climbs-tangled-branches-of-family-tree

  In new book, Alex Wagner climbs the tangled branches of her family tree
  Issues Laura Yuen · Apr 24, 2018
  Alex Wagner is a TV and print journalist and author of 'Futureface.'
  Alex Wagner is a TV and print journalist and author of the new book "Futureface." Sam Kass
  LISTEN Story audio
  4min 13sec
  As the daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up feeling special when others would wonder: "What is she?"

  "And I would delight when people would ask me if I was Hawaiian, or Egyptian or Alaskan," she said Tuesday.

  Futureface by Alex Wagner
  Futureface by Alex Wagner Penguin Random House
  But in the end, Wagner felt that being everything was the same as being nothing. So she set out to explore her family's roots in a new book called "Futureface: A family mystery, an epic quest, and the secret to belonging."

  Wagner is a CBS News contributor and one of the new hosts of Showtime's "The Circus." She'll discuss her book Tuesday night in Minneapolis.

  As a child of mixed race, she didn't feel tethered to any particular identity growing up.

  "That was OK for a while," she said. "I thought of myself as generically American. I liked Garfield and 'Saved by the Bell' and Chips Ahoy and 'Murder, She Wrote.'"

  But one day, when she was about 12 years old, she found herself alone in a diner while her dad was in the restroom.

  "The line cook at the diner turned and looked and me and said, 'Are you adopted?'" she recalled. "It was the first time I realized that the way I thought of myself was not the way everybody else thought of me. It was the first time I really questioned, 'OK, but where do I belong?' I naturally thought of myself as the daughter of a white American. I never questioned that. But other people thought I must be from some other place, that I couldn't possibly belong to him and his American story."

  Wagner said a sense of loneliness settled in. Not only as a mixed-race child, but as the only child born to her parents. In her world, there was no one who looked quite like her.

  Until high school — when she came across a picture on a magazine cover. That's where she got the idea for the name of her book, "Futureface."

  "In 1993, Time magazine ran this cover story that said, 'This is the future face of America.' And it was this racial composite image. And the woman, the racial composite, sort of looked like me," she said. "And I thought for the first time in my life, 'This is where I belong. I belong in the nebulous brown future. I am the hapa toucan, this exotic bird, flying in from some year hence to show the people of America what they'll all look like one day.'"

  But into her 30s, it was important for Wagner to root herself in the stories of her ancestors. First she went to her mother's homeland of Burma, now officially known as Myanmar. Until then, like a lot of immigrant children, she grew up hearing rose-colored versions of what her family left behind.

  "For me, the stories from Burma were these incredibly romantic, halcyon images of having bananas at tea time," she recalled. "My grandmother at one point said, 'I was raised at an early age to love Cadbury's chocolate.'"

  Wagner discovered that her own family sat atop a caste system in a country with a long history of ethnic persecution and racial animus. And she saw parallels to the anti-immigrant fervor that she had been observing in her own country.

  "The cresting nationalism and xenophobia — that was just what America was going through in its economic angst, its racial angst. But what I realized when I did more family research is that the very same and actually much more poisonous and deliberately violent strain of nationalism exists and existed in Burma. In many ways, my people — my own family — were part of the nationalist fervor that has given rise to the genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority today," she said.

  On her father's side of the family tree, she found another complicated narrative.

  "There'd be this homily about the Wagners of Lansing, Iowa," she said. "It's basically a simplistic tale told a lot by white Americans, which is, 'We came here, we worked hard, and we made it.' And there were not a lot of questions about perhaps what we were given, or what we took away."

  She learned how the Winnebago people were exiled from those lands, clearing the way for her great-grandfather from Luxembourg to settle there.

  While writing the book, Wagner lost two of her central characters. Both her Burmese grandmother and her American father died before it came out. But three weeks after her father's death, she gave birth to her first child. Wagner said the book is a gift to her son.

  She'll share more of this more truthful retelling of her family's history at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Minneapolis Central Library.

Print Marked Items
Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the
Secret to Belonging
Maggie Taft
Booklist.
114.14 (Mar. 15, 2018): p11.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text: 
Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging.
By Alex Wagner.
Apr. 2018. 352p. Oneworld, $28 (9780812997941). 920.
In 1993, the cover of Time magazine heralded a computer-generated, interracial young woman to be "the new face of America." In this picture, a
teenage Wagner, half Irish American, half Burmese American, recognized herself. But even as the magazine assured Wagner that she would be at
home in the future, she found herself increasingly curious about her past. Where had she come from? Futureface is an account of her adult efforts
to answer this question. Her research takes her from secret archives in Burma, where she learns about her family's complicity in the oppression of
the country's Indian immigrants, to a midwestern genealogy expert who aids her in deciphering nineteenth-century censuses that indicate her
great-grandfather's work as a teamster during the Franco-Prussian War. But archival records provide only partial answers, so Wagner turns to
DNA testing in the hopes that science will fill in the cracks. Relaying her journey in self-aware and witty prose, Wagner ultimately realizes that
she'll find herself not in stories of the past but in those of the present and future. --Maggie Toft
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Taft, Maggie. "Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 11. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094380/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac3b515a. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533094380
Wagner, Alex: FUTUREFACE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Wagner, Alex FUTUREFACE One World/Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 4, 17 ISBN: 978-0-8129-9794-1
A cultural commentator turns her acute observational skills and journalistic skills to the mystery of her own heritage.
When Wagner, currently an anchor and contributor for CBS News and a contributing editor at the Atlantic, started pulling the threads of history
between her Burmese mother and her American father, it didn't take long for the perceptive journalist to see that things could get messy. Her
thinking about American identity harkens back to a 1993 Time cover story that heralded a multicultural woman as "The New Face of America,"
which explained "how immigrants are shaping the world's first multicultural society"--hence her concept of "Futureface." The narrative is part
Mary Roach-style, participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. "I wanted definitive proof that I
was not alone, that I belonged....It was a mystery to be solved--several mysteries, to be honest--and, oh, did I love mysteries," writes Wagner. "I
was on the case: telephone, magnifying glass, library card, passport in hand." After introducing her family's complex genealogy, including a hint
of Jewish ancestry, Wagner recounts her trip to Burma, where she discovered the same distressing cultural fracturing she has been reporting on in
America. Without discovering any documents of substance there, she headed home to go through the complex history of Henry Wagner, her
great-grandfather, who brought his family from Luxembourg to Iowa. Wagner picks apart the "White Immigrant Origin Story," digs through
digital and physical records, and subjects herself and her family to scores of DNA tests, the results of which proved "less than convincing."
Regardless of whether Wagner solved her mystery, the journey is worth taking; it serves as a welcome reminder that tribalism and xenophobia are
dangerous but ultimately futile threats. As the author writes, the search for ancestry is "a reminder that ultimately, we are all in this together--
still."
A timely investigation that turns up "sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people
doing the expelling."
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wagner, Alex: FUTUREFACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650608/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f7a8ece3. Accessed 27 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650608

Taft, Maggie. "Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2018, p. 11. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533094380/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018. "Wagner, Alex: FUTUREFACE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650608/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 June 2018.

• The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/books/review-futureface-alex-wagner.html
  Word count: 1304

  BOOKS OF THE TIMES

  Alex Wagner Digs Into Her Family’s Past in ‘Futureface’
  By Jennifer Szalai
  April 11, 2018

  Image
  CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
  The journalist Alex Wagner has always been drawn to stories about borders and immigration. The subject is clearly newsworthy, but for her that’s been the least of it. In her debut book, “Futureface,” she describes immigration “as an interior act — becoming something new — and as the social act of losing one home and making another.” This combination of loss and reinvention can stir up heavy existential questions: “Who am I? Where do I belong?”

  Wagner — previously the anchor of her own program on MSNBC and recently named the co-host of Showtime’s political documentary series “The Circus” — was born in 1977, in Washington, D.C. The only child of a Burmese mother and a white American father, she grew up listening to histories of “migrations, escapes, settlement, assimilation.” Her mother’s family left Burma in the 1960s, after a military coup; her father grew up in Lansing, Iowa, in a large Catholic family that claimed Irish and Luxembourgian roots. Wagner was a third-culture kid, exposed to her parents’ disparate backgrounds but never fully immersed in either.

  “I thought of myself as generically American,” she writes, recalling a childhood of Chips Ahoy cookies and Sebago boat shoes. Others took a look at her and weren’t so sure. At 12, visiting a diner with her father, a white line cook asked her a question that reminded her some people couldn’t fathom she was related to a white person: Was she adopted?

  “Futureface” is fittingly hybrid in its construction, as Wagner combines memoir and journalism in order to trace the two halves of her upbringing and arrive at an understanding of where she came from and who she is. The title is the term Wagner used, half-facetiously, to refer to herself after she saw the computer-generated image of a mixed-race woman on a 1993 cover of Time magazine, heralding “The New Face of America.”

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  For Wagner, a teenager at the time, here was an identity that was intelligible — enviable, even — instead of leaving her at the mercy of confused line cooks: “I was a precursor, sent from the future to show the people of America what they would all look like a few generations hence.”

  Image
  Alex Wagner
  CreditSam Kass
  Such post-racial triumphalism now sounds bogus, and Wagner knows it. “The generic mantle of ‘mixed’ felt empowering but also weightless,” she writes. “This sense of existential unrootedness, of transience, followed me into adulthood.” Looking at the current political moment, she sees her growing disillusionment refracted in something more aggressive and poisonous.

  “There’s a creeping sense that multiculturalism might not be the answer to, but the seed of, our discontent,” she writes. “That we’ve forsaken specific ancestry for something fashionably exotic, and this has made us disconnected and isolated, or angry and confused.”

  So she embarks on a quest to find out as much as she can about both sides of her family, beyond the gauzy stories that have been handed down. What begins as a reflective memoir of loneliness and longing turns into a methodical investigation, as Wagner digs into the archives, calls up experts and tests her DNA.

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  She’s primed to discover the worst. Her mother and her maternal grandmother, who became a democracy activist in American exile, spoke of their lives in Burma with such reverence that it made Wagner suspicious: “It always rang alarm bells when anyone got misty-eyed about the good times, because, in reality, those were often the actually pretty bad times for quite a few other people.”

  Wagner unearths Burma’s long history of ethnic cleansing and failed social experiments — though whether her family was involved in the truly nasty stuff is never entirely clear. Her great-grandfather worked in a credit union, the pivot point in a cooperative lending system that eventually collapsed because of lax standards.

  “It pained me to think of my great-grandfather as an actor who’d brought so many Burmese to their knees, courtesy of a failed banking system,” she writes. But did he? She doesn’t find evidence that her great-grandfather actually made bad loans; only that some people in similar positions did.

  “Futureface” raises urgent questions having to do with history and complicity. Wagner is determined to look at her family with the coldest eye, making excuses for no one. Considering how tempting it is to let loved ones off the hook, her ruthlessness can feel refreshing and often admirable. I’ve rarely encountered a family history this unsparing. Hers, however, can come off as unsparing to a fault.

  Wagner’s parents are committed liberals — they met on the job, working for the Teamsters — but they’re presented here as inveterate hypocrites. After recounting one of her mother’s giggling jokes, Wagner writes: “My mother had a lot of opinions about a lot of ethnic groups, which she would probably attribute to her broad reading habits and extensive travels, and which I chalked up to a proclivity toward ethnic tribalism and an innate haughtiness.”

  She’s a little more forgiving of her father, though not by much. He “had an annoying habit of adopting (his version of) the local accent, in a pathetic and ill-advised bid to ‘fit in.’” She portrays her Burmese grandmother’s friendships with gay men and black men in the 1960s and ’70s as hardly more than a calculated bid for assimilation: “In her seeming tolerance, ironically, she moved closer to a certain white, liberal American ideal.”

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  Such ungenerous assessments aren’t necessarily inaccurate; Wagner knows her family better than I do. But in her push to dismantle some cherished myths, her book starts to feel bloodless, so shorn of sentiment that Wagner’s project loses the profoundly personal feelings that animated it in the first place.

  It would be one thing if she uncovered definitive evidence of a real whopper, an astounding family secret; what she discovers instead are the kinds of skeletons — illegitimacy, hypocrisy, selective memory, callous prejudice — that are distressing, but also distressingly common.

  These ordinary cruelties might not make for riveting journalism, but they make for a rich and revealing memoir. As Wagner points out, so much of the American dream revolves around those who built their selves “on deceit and half-truths.”

  What’s missing in “Futureface” is a palpable sense of who Wagner became after her teenage years. She self-deprecatingly alludes to being a “bad friend” who lives with her husband in “an overpriced converted yuppie loft complex” that she despises. For the most part, though, Wagner turns her gaze outward, away from her life as it is right now. The result is a book that seems mercilessly honest from one angle and carefully guarded from another.

  Wagner’s skepticism and irreverence are so polished that you want to get a better sense of what motivates them. But the harsh light she shines on those around her can be so blinding that we lose sight of who she is.

  Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.

  Futureface
  A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging
  By Alex Wagner
  Illustrated. 338 pages. One World. $28.

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