I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

May 30, 2016
The author, daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly, a publisher and acclaimed art director at the New Yorker, places her family—particularly its women—under a high-powered microscope in this penetrating memoir. As a child, Speigelman often sensed that her mother’s family was “dangerous,” but her inquiries were brushed aside by the independent and hard-working Mouly, who suggested that she would enlighten her daughter at a later time. When Mouly finally sits down to describe her life in detail, the protective gloves come off. In heart-to-heart talks with her mother and with her grandmother (Josee, a divorcee who lives on a houseboat on the Seine) that take place over a number of years, Spiegelman probes the undercurrent of uneasiness she’s felt her whole life. Mouly fled her Parisian family at age 18, moving to New York to escape her mother’s criticism as well as her father’s inappropriate behaviors; she eventually turned her critical eye on her own daughter, who struggled with compulsive eating and other issues. When Spiegelman begins interviewing her grandmother, however, she finds a loving woman who doesn’t fit Mouly’s recollections. Memories overlap and contradict as the author unwinds the past; even some of Spiegelman’s memories, she realizes, may be imagined. As the three women own and apologize for past and present mistakes and misunderstandings, this intricate family tale evokes a growing sense that forgiveness and love are ultimately far more important than facts.

June 1, 2016
All is not as it seems. That's a good rule in life--and especially in family histories, the subject of this elegant memoir.The daughter of New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly and Maus creator Art Spiegelman grew up surrounded by smart people and bright talk, always with the knowledge that mom was a touch eccentric. Her account opens with an episode involving a lightning storm over a choppy ocean, a risk taken seriously, Mouly believed, "by timid women who washed their vegetables"--and that her relatives across the water in France might be a touch dottier still. That wasn't the half of it. As Spiegelman recounts, it took a residence abroad in Paris and frequent exposure to her grandparents to understand just why it was that her mother might have wanted to put an ocean between them. Of her plastic-surgeon grandfather, her mother protested, "you don't understand. He's just used to touching women." There's more to it than all that, providing some of the book's darker moments, which are alleviated by grand-mere's antics, even if that sturdy elder demanded that she be called Josee, as if to magically ward off the suspicion that the decades had passed. "My grandmother was beautiful long after she was beautiful," Spiegelman writes, getting it just right. "She carried herself and dressed herself in a way that left no question." The oddness of mother runs to grandmother and on into the past, as Spiegelman explores decades of memory with knowing nods: "Mina slapped Josee often. Which is not to say she was an abused child, she added quickly." In the end, readers may be left with a sense of gratitude that his or her family is comparatively normal, which is not to say that these folks are terrible--odd, sure, but muddling through, with a sometimes-rueful but empathetic descendant recalling episodes they might well want to forget. A fascinating, gracefully written glimpse into the complexities of family life, full of secrets, hidden wounds, and survival tips.

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Starred review from August 1, 2016
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2016

Spiegelman is the daughter of Maus genius Art Spiegelman, but her memoir focuses on her mother, the Paris-born Francoise Mouly, longtime art director of The New Yorker. Spiegelman always regarded her mother with awe but grew increasingly frustrated during adolescence as questions about a darkness she sensed in her mother's past were always met with, "I'm supposed to protect you from all this." Not until after college did Spiegelman learn about the abiding pain in her mother's upbringing. Being compared to classic memoirs like Mary Karr's The Liar's Club.

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