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.
