'Nadja Spiegelman shows love, anger, long-lived pain and late-learned gratitude contriving to coexist, as each woman shapes her story.' Times Literary Supplement
A memoir of mothers and daughters, traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again.
More than Nadja Spiegelman's famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and 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. The weight of the difficult stories Françoise told her daughter shifted the balance between them. Nadja's grandmother's memories then 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 and how sometimes those who love us best hurt us most. Readers will recognise themselves and their families in this moving, heartbreaking memoir.
Nadja Spiegelman has written three graphic novels for children. She grew up in New York City and now divides her time between Paris and Brooklyn.
'Much like her father [Art Spiegelman] in Maus, Spiegelman braids the past with the present...At the core of these culled recollections is less a tally of pain and grievances than a testament to survival.' Guardian UK
'Nadja is excellent at remembering, with a brilliant eye for the hilarious, disquieting and uncanny... The book is as affectionate as it is detailed, and the affection is deepened by this attention to detail, Nadja's willingness to explore her subjects' difficult sides.' Saturday Paper
'Nadja traces back four generations of her family and writes sensitively, beautifully and honestly about the women in her mother, Francoise's family and she and Francoise's own compelling, conflicted relationship. A really thoughtful book that won't fail to resonate.' Red Online
'Spiegelman's narrative complicates, blurs, and questions the line between the self and the other—that basic fault-line of all autobiographical writing—as perhaps only a story about mothers can.' Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
'Spiegelman's sagely poetic "memoir" is maybe best described as the biography of a mother seen through the eyes of a daughter...[Her] intimate portrait of female identity and idolatry is intelligent, forthright and heartbreaking. Her sentences will haunt me forever.' Heidi Julavits
'Nadja Spiegelman's I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This works like a series of Russian nesting dolls: in every mother, she finds a woman who was once a daughter. Her prose is luminous and precise; her portraits intricately tender but charged by the wild electricity of familial love. I felt myself moved and expanded as I read this thoughtful, probing book—and I called my own mother the moment I was done.' Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
'Nadja Spiegelman has written a passionate, penetrating, swiftly paced memoir about her mother, her grandmother, and herself. In sharp contrast to many writers working in the genre, who naively assume they are in possession of the definitive, true version of their stories, Spiegelman nimbly interrogates the workings of memory itself—its shifting shape and unreliability, its fictional character. I am proud to play a bit part in this complex love story...
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