I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
A Memoir
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4.6 • 23 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We’ve always loved books that give us rare glimpses into what really happens in other families’ most private moments. In I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, Nadja Spiegelman weaves back and forth between her formative memories of growing up in downtown New York and her elegant mother’s own recollections of her unhappy upbringing in France. It’s a stunningly honest and moving account of twisted mother-daughter dynamics and two women’s steady march toward self-realization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author, daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Fran oise 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.
Customer Reviews
Amazing!
Every mother/daughter must read this book.