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Summary
Summary
A Vogue Best Book of the Year
"What Ferrante did for female friends--exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold--Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She's essentially written My Brilliant Mom." --Slate
A memoir of mothers and daughters--and mothers as daughters--traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again.
For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers--French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly--exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand," their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother's past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them.
It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother's memories contradicted her mother's at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.
Author Notes
Nadja Spiegelman grew up in New York City and now divides her time between Paris and Brooklyn.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With two prominent intellectual parents (cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, and Françoise Mouly, New Yorker art editor, graphic novel publisher, and recipient of numerous artistic awards), Spiegelman must grapple with her legacy but finds the more challenging endeavor to be reconciling the barrier between her mother and herself. She traces her life in contrast to her mother to see the lines of difference, but she also comes to learn the ways in which they are more alike than she imagined. In the audio edition, Spiegelman wavers in her reading. At times, her delivery drones on without much inflection and energy. In other sections, and particularly those with dialogue, her voice becomes lively with emphasis and emotion. Her most impressive feat in narrating comes with her seamless shifts into French accents and even French itself as she moves through conversations in her mother's native tongue. A Riverhead hardcover. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Spiegelman grew up in awe of her mother's ability to transform things and situations with fairylike skills, and her mother, New Yorker art editor Francoise Mouly, would promise her that when Spiegelman turned 16, she'd learn how, too. Spiegelman's interest in her mother's story weathered her often stormy teen years and was rewarded when Mouly began to openly, generously share her secrets and her past with her. Spiegelman, whose father, Art, won a Pulitzer for his graphic novel Maus (1986), first tells Mouly's story of growing up in Paris and provincial French boarding schools before escaping her difficult, upper-class family for the freedom of Manhattan. Aware of her mother's painful history with her own mother, Spiegelman moves to Paris to get to know her grandmother more deeply, and she becomes the focus of the memoir's second half. Spiegelman's stunning and artistic first adult book is a touching, surprising consideration of the unclear inheritances of family and the certain fallibility of memory. Thanks to the literary time travel her exercise affords, Spiegelman sees her subjects, and herself, in a way she never otherwise could have. In the process, she learns and writes page-turning true stories of women, their work and love, which read like novels, and gains the rare sort of understanding that precludes the need for forgiveness.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE UNSEEN WORLD, by Liz Moore. (Norton, $15.95.) The daughter of a brilliant computer scientist deciphers the mysteries of his life in Moore's novel. Ada was home-schooled by her father, joining him in his laboratory as he worked to develop natural language processing for computers. When he begins to exhibit signs of dementia, she spends the next decades of her life deciphering the coded message he gave to her, revealing secrets about his history. THE WAY TO THE SPRING: Life and Death in Palestine, by Ben Ehrenreich. (Penguin, $18.) Over three years in the West Bank, Ehrenreich lived with Palestinian families and reported on daily life for publications including The New York Times Magazine. In a series of character sketches of the people he encountered from Hebron to Ramallah, his book offers particular insight into life under occupation. HOT MILK, by Deborah Levy. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Sofia - a deeply unreliable, underemployed anthropologist and the heroine of this novel - follows her hypochondriac mother to a dubious health center in Spain. "The book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo," our reviewer, Leah Hager Cohen, wrote. "Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui." EAST WEST STREET: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity," by Philippe Sands. (Vintage, $19.) These concepts form the core of the international justice system, and Sands investigates the two men responsible for bringing them to light. Our reviewer, Bernard-Henri Levy, called the account a narrative "in which the reader observes the life and work of two ordinary men drawn by unwavering passion and driven very nearly insane by the griefs and the hopes bequeathed to each of them." LONER, by Teddy Wayne. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) At Harvard, David Federman, a painfully unpopular and anonymous freshman, becomes obsessed with a beautiful, wealthy classmate whose indifference seems only to spur him further. Class, power and privilege are at the forefront of Wayne's novel, as David pursues his love interest with increasing, unsettling urgency. I'M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU FROM ALL THIS: A Memoir, by Nadja Spiegelman. (Riverhead, $16.) Spiegelman explores four generations of women in her family in this account, which grew out of interviews she conducted with her mother, Françoise Mouly, the art director of The New Yorker. She borrows tactics from her father, Art Spiegelman, who documented his family's experience with the Holocaust in his graphic novel "Maus."
Guardian Review
This charged memoir by the daughter of celebrated parents centres on her relationship with her mother, one defined by love and anger When MetaMau s, a companion to Maus -- Art Spiegelman 's celebrated graphic memoir of the devastation wrought on his family by the Holocaust -- was published in 2011, it included interviews with his wife, Francoise Mouly, and their children, Nadja and Dashiell. Nadja's came first in the sequence, and began with her memory of being, aged around five, with her father in a Chinese restaurant, shortly after Maus had won the Pulitzer prize. She recounts how, after proudly telling this news to the waiter, she was scolded for bragging and felt shame, and embarrassment. "I never volunteer information about who my dad is now," she says. A remembered injury, however long in the past, can inhibit and wound its recipient seemingly out of all proportion. But the book is also about owning stories -- almost invariably a charged business, and in the Mouly-Spiegelman household, strikingly so. "Instead of anecdotes," Nadja writes, "we had narratives", and their details were forever scrapped over and horse-traded. It is this process that powers her memoir, which focuses not on her father's family, but on her mother's. There is a vital connection to Maus -- just as Art interviewed his father, so Nadja interviews her mother and grandmother. Her memoir is also crucially different, because her mother's family tree has not been stripped bare by atrocity. But these lives have not been plain sailing, either. Francoise loomed in her daughter's life as a figure of fearlessness, a combination of domestic powerhouse and professional high-flier (she has been the art editor of the New Yorker since 1993, and a prolific publisher of children's books and graphic magazines). She was also an adventurer, likely to grab her small children by the hand and run with them into a storm-hit Brazilian ocean. Scornful of risk, she "disdained most dangers as American constructs, invented by timid women who washed their vegetables". When Nadja confided that her maternal grandfather, once a cosmetic surgeon, had touched her breasts and her stomach, and stroked her bottom when he thought she was sleeping, her mother replied that "he's just used to touching women". When the subject resurfaces a few years later, Francoise is horrified and backs Art's decision to cut him out of their lives. Nadja recalls recording her arguments with her mother in her childhood diary, and marking with them an encircled capital "R", to reassure herself that they were real. She also reports Francoise's remark to friends, who enquired how Nadja's memoir is going, that it's "a little like being on death row, awaiting my lethal injection". Serious episodes -- nervous breakdown, an unwillingly undertaken abortion, rape, self-harm, suicide -- stud the book Throughout, there is a sense of the danger and potential destructiveness of contested memory, which intensifies when Nadja widens her investigations to include her French grandmother, Josee, who occupies a houseboat on the Seine. Unsurprisingly, many of Francoise's attributes that Nadja struggled with -- the imperviousness to her daughter's upset, the lightning changes in mood -- reveal themselves as a form of learned or inherited behaviour. Exceptionally serious episodes -- nervous breakdown, an unwillingly undertaken abortion, rape, self-harm, suicide attempts -- stud the book. They are punctuated by much less grave events, such as the story of a lemon pie, made by Francoise as a child during a skiing holiday and remembered as so impenetrable her father called for a saw to cut it up. Except, no, Josee insists, decades later, the story doesn't end with a saw, it ends with an avalanche. You begin to see the problem. But differing accounts of shared history are meat and drink to memoirists, and surely so universal as to be unremarkable. There has to be something else going on for us to want to read further. So what is Spiegelman's point? In an extremely mazy, meandering narrative, in which reaches into the past often seem tenuous, the answer is surely not in establishing the literal truth. Rather, her subject appears to be -- as Francoise says, almost in passing -- the impossibility of feeling anger towards one's mother, and the extent to which to do so would require a belief in potential change. Is it better, though, to accept that love and anger can co-exist; and that, particularly in mother-daughter relationships, such dynamics and dramas are frequently played out in the body, in attitudes towards lovers, food, appearance? Nadja cannot answer these questions definitively -- who could? -- but she can pose them arrestingly and illuminatingly. Her book leaves one in little doubt that she is both her mother's and her father's daughter. - Alex Clark.