In Battlegrounds of Memory Clay Lewis crosses seven generations of his family to illuminate a heritage of romantic hope and abject defeat, seeking freedom from the past by understanding it.

Heritage was a heavy burden on Lewis's parents, children of the South whose denial of their past bound them more tightly to it. Their battles with each other and their son followed old patterns of intergenerational conflict. The book opens with a harrowing scene in which the author as a teenager is urged by his mother to discipline his drunken father.

In the forty years since be assaulted his father, Lewis has struggled to understand how his family was changed by the history they had experienced - the wilderness frontier, the Civil War, and the Great Depression. How they were changed ultimately became his legacy.

In the Marines he found that his capacity for violence ran deep; in his unhappy marriages he found himself repeating old mistakes. Over the years he began to recognize that the terrible wounds on both sides of his family formed patterns of scapegoats and rebels, of betrayal and grief, and finally of yearning and hope. In this knowledge he found freedom.