I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This

by Nadja Spiegelman

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.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, France, Biography Memoir, Feminism, Family

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 2016

About the author

Nadja Spiegelman is the Eisner-award nominated author of the ZIG AND WIKKI graphic series for young children and LOST IN NYC: A SUBWAY ADVENTURE. Her forthcoming memoir, "I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This," will be published by Riverhead Books in August 2016. She currently divides her time between Paris and Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The things my mother did not see about herself, I did not see, either.”

This book was exactly what I’ve been looking for, and I didn’t realize this until I was done. I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This is a memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again.

We start out with an introduction to the growing relationship between mother and daughter. And I was swept away with memories.

“While other people joked bitterly about becoming their mothers, I longed to. I didn’t even understand how she had become herself.”

Though their relationship started out rocky, when Nadja Spiegelman suggest that she would like to write about her mother - about her coming of age - the boundaries between them fell, and fell suddenly.

“There was nothing I couldn’t ask. She answered me with a searching honesty rare even in the privacy of one’s own thoughts. She made time for me in her overcrowded life. We talked at our kitchen table, in her downstairs office, on the couch. We talked until early-morning light streamed through the skylight and the cars started honking again on Canal Street. We went away together, just the two of us, to a country cabin and talked for days. I graduated from college, I moved into my parents’ house, I moved out of my parents’ house, I took my first job and then my second. We talked for years.”

“One evening, she told me that there was no one else she could talk to this way. Not my father. Not her friends. By that point, she could reference any moment in her life with barely a hand gesture. I sometimes felt I knew her past so intimately that I could read her thoughts.
“But with you,” she said, “you’re so close. Like when you were a baby. I don’t . . . I can’t worry about how you’ll see me. You’re a part of me.”

I loved reading about their growing relationship.



I’ve been looking for the perfect mother-daughter book for months now - maybe even years - to really get me. And this was it. This was exactly what I was so desperate for.
There were just too many moments were I kept exclaiming, "YES, YES, YES, they understand."

There was talk about feminism, the aftermaths of 9/11, close familial relationships, coming-of age, body image issues... and they all resonated with me.

Particularly the chapter about 9/11:

“The morning it happened, my parents had gone out to vote in the mayoral primary. They had just left our house; they were on our street. My mother saw a plane fly low overhead. She followed it with her eyes. She watched it leave a hole in the tower.
My mother counted the stories. The tower had been breached. The top might fall. She saw it in her mind’s eye, falling. She saw the radius around it, saw my school. My father had gone upstairs to check the news. My mother screamed his name in the street, wild with fear. Onlookers stared. She called his cell phone frantically until he came downstairs. She dragged him into the heart of the chaos that others were already fleeing. For nearly an hour, my parents searched the school building for me.
It is posed as a theoretical question, whether a mother would run into a burning building to save her child. It is not one that many people know the answer to.”

I think this was the first time I had read about someone being so near to the event.

I was so into their lives that I barely noticed time slip while flipping page after page... I think I found my new favorite genre: memoirs.

I was also absolutely pulled in whenever we were told more about Françoise’s life and her growing relationship with her daughter. I loved it because I always urge my mother to tell me details of her childhood and adolescence. I love discovering who my mother was as a little girl. It's just too fascinating for me to not know.

This quote from Wild by Cheryl Strayed perfectly describes what I want to convey.

“All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. ”

So when Nadja went sometimes years without knowing the continuation of a story, I was just… HOW ?? I always have to learn everything about an old memory.

And while reading I discovered that it’s always the things about family that I’m interested in. Reading about everything that went on in her mother's life was really jarring. She went through so much shit, and it actually hurt me to see her hurt. It's like everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, before arriving in America.
But through every event that was told so vividly, I learned a new kind of awe for mothers.

“Come here,” she said and pulled me into her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. My poor girl.”
“Why?” I said miserably. “Why should you be sorry?”
“Because,” she said, “I’m your mother. I’m supposed to protect you from all this.”

Determined to fully get to know her mother's life story, Nadja decides to move to France for the next year and interview her mother's mother. She wants to understand Josée more thoroughly to comprehend her family history.

Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own.

“My mother had told me once that her life felt like literature to her. It was filled with resonances and symbolism. I had always felt similarly, and I wondered now if everyone did. The acts of omission and inclusion we made in our memories were creative acts, through which we authored our lives. ”

But the one thing I loved most was reading about Nadja discussing the supernatural with Josée.

“She told me about her past lives. She’d been a man in many of them, which, she said, explained a lot. In one, she had been stabbed in the back with a pitchfork by her cheating wife. She had bled out over three days in a cow’s trough, which was why she’d always hated hay. In one, Mélanie had been her sister, and this explained the affinity they had always had.”

“And she told me that she often felt Mina close by.
“I keep telling her to go up,” Josée said. “Go up, Maman, go up go up go up! Go do something else! Because there are many things you can do after you die, you know, you don’t have to stay here. You can be reincarnated. But she won’t go. It does make me happy, though, having her near. Every time I hear the squeal of brakes behind me, or I almost trip and catch myself, I say ‘Merci, Maman!’”

Like I said in previous reviews, this kind of stuff is my Achilles' heel.

Also, after everything that happened I couldn't stop thinking about how truly incredible Nadja's mother is.

“I felt, as I often felt, the violence of my project. What right did I have to reach so deep into her past? I had asked my friends, women between twenty and thirty, if they had asked their mothers to tell them their lives in this way. Most said no. Most said they weren’t sure they’d want to know.”

I was extremely glad when Nadja decided to finish her project. And as I previously mentioned in my review, I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This was exactly my kind of family story. It was jarring, ravishing and felt like home inside my heart.

And I knew it became a favorite of mine when I decided to read even the acknowledgments just to prolong my time with this book. I actually felt homesick when I finished it.

*Note: I'm an Amazon Affiliate. If you're interested in buying I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This, just click on the image below to go through my link. I'll make a small commission!*


This review and more can be found on my blog.

[marta the book slayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Perhaps I wasn’t afraid of my own death but of the loss of my youth. Perhaps I wasn’t afraid of my mother’s death but that I would be able to keep living without her."

4.3/5

The passage that the above quote was chosen from made me cry. I don't think I have ever read such a moving passage about the loss of one's mother. It pained me to read because I have also stayed up late some nights worrying about this; the feeling so overwhelming I felt like I was drowning. It was reassuring to find my inner fears put to words.

The pacing of this memoir is a bit strange. I was interested to find that 60% of it really centered around her mother; the remaining portion of the book is her time with her grandmother and some stories of her great-grandmother. While discussing the upbringing of her mother, the author interjects with her own stories making the chronology a bit difficult to follow. I don't think the synopsis of the book is an accurate portrayal of what reading the story is like.

The beginning of the book really stressed that there was a strained relationship between the author and her mother but there was less focus on that as the story continued. As messy as some parts of the story felt, I feel that it was an accurate portrayal of different generations of females. Some of the actions that occurred were painful to read and some a bit humorous. I'm glad I picked up this memoir because I was overall incredibly surprised by how relatable some of the author's feelings were.

[Axel Barceló · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading non-fiction and lately I have been reading a lot of memoirs and autobiographical books (Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”, Dave Eggers “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, Julie Doucet’s “My New York Diary”, etc.) and it is clear to me that part of their success stems from them one or two very well defined underlying concepts or themes. Now, I am currently reading Nadja Siegelman’s “I’m supposed to protect you from all this” and, yesterday I started writing this brief text about how much I was really enjoying how there seemed to be no clear or well defined underlying motif or topic. I think it makes it feel more life-like, more chaotic and therefore, more human. On its surface, one might think that its underlying topic is the mother-daughter relation, as it manifests in the relationships between Nadja and her mother, Françoise, and the relationship between Françoise herself and her mother, Josée. It is very tempting also to think of it as the female response to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, giving voice to the women excluded from Spiegelman’s story: just as Art’s work uses Art’s father’s memories to frame his own reflections on fatherhood and sonhood, Nadja tries to use her mother (Art’s wife) and her grandmother memories to frame her own reflections on motherhood and daughterhood. So, it is a kind of French-American "Gilmore Girls". But that barely scratches the surface of all that is happening in the book. You see other strong currents underneath the surface: a reflection on class and Bohemia here, a love letter to New York (and Paris) there, etc. Front and center, there is also an interesting treatment of the function of memory and storytelling; on reliability and identity. But any topic or theme one might think bundles all the stories together disappears almost as soon as one tries to trace it across more than a dozen pages or so. Yet, instead of making the text seem like a failure, I think it makes it more honest, closer to how life really is; for in real life, things happen with no reason and no plan, they lead nowhere. I was starting to admire Nadja Spiegelman for respecting the randomness of her story and her history.

However, today I kept reading chapter eight and suddenly realised that I was wrong: THERE IS an underlying theme to the book! and it is not even hidden. On the contrary, the theme was right there staring at me the whole time on the book’s title. So, yes, the book is about mother-daughters relations, as one might easily suspect, but it is also about something more specific than that. It is a book about the protection expected from mothers to daughters (and perhaps, also the other way around, in later years). It is about the burden and the expectation of mothers caring and looking after their children, but specially looking after their daughters, for the dangers of the world are heavily stacked against them. Furthermore, it also about the neurosis of knowing that, no matter how much you love them, how much you care for them, how much you devote to their well-being, you can never protect them from it all. things will happen to them, and you will feel powerless, you will feel guilty. You will also try to minimise some of it, and even deny it; it is normal. It is normal to keep thinking “I was supposed to protect you from all this”.
Also, I cried as I read the author's last words.

[Lindsay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had heard good things and was really excited to get into this. I love reading dark, complex tales about womanhood, femininity, mothers, etc. But the narrator had no sense of humor and no self-awareness. She grew up insanely privileged, which is fine, but seems to have no idea that most people don't have the same upbringing as she did.

For example: when she's talking about how hard it was to have a beautiful mother when she was an awkward, heavy teen, she says that her mom was asked to pose for Vogue, while poor Nadja was only asked to model for Teen People for the "Real Bodies" section. Are you kidding me?

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“My mother wasn’t perfect. My mother was intense. Things didn’t happen because they were possible, they happened because she decided they would….but, as anyone who has read a fairytale knows, all spells come with a cost. The magic pulled on hidden sources. … she could set the universe aflame, but she used herself as fuel. Somewhere inside, the earth was scorched”.

I’m Supposed To Protect You From All This is a memoir by American graphic novelist and author, Nadja Spiegelman. Nadja is the daughter of cartoonist Art Spiegelman (author of the graphic novel Maus) and Françoise Mouly (art editor of the New Yorker since 1993), and this memoir is dedicated to her mother and grandmother. Nadja decides to write about her mother’s coming of age: the process, naturally enough, requires input from her mother, Françoise, and her maternal grandmother, Josée, who had a career as a ghostwriter.

“My mother did not agree right away. She thought about it carefully. And then, having decided, she held nothing back. The boundaries between us fell, and fell suddenly. She let me in. there was nothing I couldn’t ask. She answered me with a searching honesty rare even in the privacy of one’s own thoughts. She made time for me in her crowded life”

At times, the narrative from Françoise’s perspective is so intimate, the reader can be forgiven for thinking that the words are Nadja’s: “’Don’t talk back to me,’ Josée replied. She was capable of saying things so terrible they blacked out the sun. ‘No one will ever love a girl like you,’ she might say. ‘How could you expect them to? A disagreeable, insolent, unpleasant girl like you?’ The words shot darkness over Francoise’s future and blotted out all hope. She was miserable. She would always be miserable. There was no escape”

Nadja finds that nothing is straightforward when dealing with memories: “According to neuroscientists, when we stir up a long-term memory, it floats in our consciousness, unstable, for a window of approximately three hours. During this time, the memory is malleable. The present infiltrates the past. We add details to fill in the gaps. Then the brain re-encodes the memory as if it were new, writing over the old one. As it sinks back down into the depths of our minds, we are not even aware of what we have gained or lost, or why”

She spends a year in Paris, eventually connecting with Josée, learning more about her grandmother and her great-grandmother, Mina, who worked as a secretary. “Secretary, ghostwriter, editor – I called upon the three generations like muses. But I was none of these things. I was the narrator, giving shape to memories that weren’t my own. And that, I was learning, was a much more violent act”

She finds there are parallels in the lives of mothers and daughters: “And then my frozen moment sprang back into motion. Josée’s car pulled off into the road. Françoise fell into Mina’s arms. Mina took Françoise, Josée’s least favorite daughter, and loved her ferociously. I saw a pattern forming, like a series of skipping stones that sent ripples through the generations: all the granddaughters and grandmothers who loved each other, all the mothers left stranded between”.

“The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past” is something Nadja discovers applies to what she hears from her grandmother, her mother and herself: “Neither my mother, my father, nor my brother remembered things the way I did. I tried to remind myself that we could each have our own versions. My mother’s was not more real than my own. But I never quite believed this was true”

This is a book about family, about memory, forgiveness, about love. Spiegelman sets it all down in beautiful prose:“’Sillage’…it could also describe the perfume that lingered in the air after its wearer left the room. I sniffed the decanter again but the smell had dissipated. There was little of my grandfather left to forgive, and perhaps, I thought, this was all I would ever find: the ripples in the water, the lingering smell”. Interesting and thought-provoking.

[bird · Rating 2 out of 5]

exquisite case study in why no one should write a memoir, least of all an intergenerational memoir, before 40. i'm sorry to say it but having taken the easy way out myself, having an interesting family does not make you interesting, and desperately seeking to feel, then successfully becoming, beloved by your family is not a critical position from which to interrogate said family!

i almost quit on this after the first few chapters when it sunk in that nadja truly was reproducing all her mother's dictated stories in neither her mother's voice nor within her own meaning-making but as generic narrative-- i kept going when i read that she later interviews her grandmother and explores the tension in the two stories, per the jacket copy, but reader she truly is not examining this tension. like, laying two divergent stories or women side by side and going "huh! different!" is not exegesis. i can't emphasize enough how much not even one time did the author consider WHY these relational or narrative divergences exist-- what purpose they may serve-- what they illuminate or enclose-- what personal reckoning of truth or self or inheritance they lead her to reject or hold.

the hunger for her mother and grandmother both to adore her, for she herself to uniquely Understand them and adroitly Navigate them-- that is the hubris of childhood. that is the urge actively preventing her from any meaningful insight. it's really wild how little self-interrogation or self-as-relational-or-channeling-figure there is for HOW MUCH id is sloshing absolutely everywhere. even in the related conversations that are mostly her mother/grandmother talking, we keep getting "i said gently" "i sighed in relief" "i nodded almost imperceptibly" no you DIDNT. who TALKS like this. where ARE you.

there's a bit where her mom says basically "i don't want to talk about the past with my mother anymore; it's too painful" and nadja says, verbatim, "ok but for me this tension of your shared pasts is interesting" ok baby girl?? who cares??? that's what your book was presumably for?????

[Adrienne Blaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is about the unrequited love daughters have for their mothers. It’s also about how that story is a lie. The stories we tell about our mothers cover up and expose the pain of being loved in imperfect, broken ways. The stories mothers choose not to tell their daughters reveal the difficult choices they make in the name of love. Nadja Spiegelman engages in this game of hide and seek across generations. She has openly written a fantasy of her family’s mother-daughter relationships through the lens of collected fallible memories. A memoir that acknowledges the fiction inherent in the truth is my favorite kind. I was thinking I would read this book and pass it along, but now I have to keep it, because I already plan to re-read it.

[Gabril · Rating 3 out of 5]

Figlia d’arte (il padre è Art, l’autore del premiatissimo Maus, la madre, Françoise, è art director del New Yorker), Nadja Spiegelman, scrive un memoir che ripercorre la vita di Françoise, innanzitutto, ma anche della nonna Josée e in parte della bisnonna Mina. Quattro generazioni di donne, insomma, perché la storia è anche la sua: quella di una bambina e poi di una ragazza che ha avuto con la madre una relazione complessa, nutrita di infinito amore e aspro conflitto.

La caratteristica principale del racconto, che si costruisce a partire dalla testimonianza diretta, consiste nella riflessione che il passato, anche se condiviso, è sempre un’esperienza di rielaborazione soggettiva e questo è ciò che intimamente e profondamente dovremmo riconoscere e poi accettare. In exergo, infatti, la citazione di Valery: “La memoria non ci servirebbe a niente se fosse rigorosamente fedele.” (Qui si aprono mondi sulle memorie ripercorse e immaginate : primo e emblematico fra tutti quello di Proust ).

Oltre alla storia in sé, dunque, che è narrativa e aneddotica, c’è anche un pensiero a margine sul significato del passato e soprattutto della sua interpretazione.
“Avevo cercato di recente l’etimologia della parola passato. Veniva dal francese pas, passo, dal latino passus, lunghezza di una gamba. Inizialmente significava viaggio. Il passato, dunque, non era un posto fisso che si poteva visitare. Non era statico. Era un viaggio, un movimento continuo”.
È appunto il viaggio che intraprende Nadja intervistando prima la madre e poi la nonna.

Forse l’aspetto più interessante del memoir è proprio questo confronto impari fra tutti coloro che ricostruiscono i propri ricordi e dunque li reinventano. Accettare la sottile, inevitabile discrepanza tra i medesimi vissuti diventa la chiave per lenire quelle ferite che altrimenti tenderebbero a rimanere, sia pur sopite, sempre fresche e vive. In ogni generazione il rapporto con la madre è problematico e ogni generazione inventa delle strategie per poterlo riparare.

Commentando con la figlia la festa che ha organizzato per l’ottantaquattresimo compleanno dell’impegnativa mamma Josée, Françoise dice:
“È stato utile perché siamo sopravvissute. È sempre tutto lì- lei è la dolce madre che invecchia, che posso portare in vacanza e cercare di compiacere. Io sono la figlia adulta che ha costruito la sua vita a un oceano di distanza. E lei è sempre anche la persona capace di distruggermi. Io sono sempre la ragazza senza risorse. E adesso sappiamo che possiamo andare e tornare, e il fuoco non ci brucerà vive. Possiamo toccare quelle cose, e possiamo sopravvivere”.

“Dovrei proteggerti da tutto questo” è la dichiarazione emblematica del genitore perfetto. Un condizionale, appunto.

Forse il difetto del libro è avere messo troppo contenuto e averlo trattato, ovviamente, in modo impari. Lo spazio occupato da Françoise è quello prevalente e diventa anche il più interessante rispetto al resto, che appare più sfumato. Forse di generazioni ne bastavano tre...o addirittura due. Perché il rischio è di incunearsi nel dettaglio aneddotico, perdere di vista il senso complessivo e diminuire la consistenza delle donne originali e complicate di cui si va raccontando.

[Jackie Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have mixed feelings about this book. I really like reading about real lives for the most part. However this book kept me jumping backwards to remember which person was being talked about at any given time. Is about three generations of women that were not shown much love or affection in childhood. the grandmother was self absorbed and her daughter became the same and the granddaughter is wanting to know of their growing up years and who they are today. Was interesting enough to keep me reading but confusing at times as who's story was being told. This book comes out in early August.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

So the guy who wrote The Complete Maus has a daughter, and that daughter is Nadja. Who knew, right? Ever wonder what it's like to grow up in a house with parents such as Art Spiegelman and The New Yorker art designer, Françoise Mouly? Nadja lets you know, sort of, though her memoir is mostly about the women in her family: her mother, her grandmother, her great-grandmother. If you're looking for scoop on Art, you're not really going to get it here, though there's a little. This is really about four generations of women, their relationships, and memory - how it fails us, how we fail it.

"I have a terrible memory," my mother said then. ... "All of my memories," she continued morosely, "all of my memories have my children in them. Even the ones from before they were born."

"So your life began twenty-three years ago," Paul said. That was my age at the time.

"I guess so," my mother said.

"But that's very sweet," Siri said.

"Is it?" my mother said. "It seems a bit sad to me."

But I do not think my mother meant that she remembered only her life after my birth. I think she meant what she said: that we were in all of her memories, even though we could not be. The narratives were part of my mother's power. The past shaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past.
(p17)

If that last sentence doesn't just sum everything up, I don't know what does.

I read this because I'm doing this whole book of essays thing for graduate school, and a lot of what I have written so far involves childhood memories. And anyone who knows me knows that I have the absolute worst memory. The idea of memory is always fascinating to me, and people who can write about the fallibility of memory, and do it well, is A+ in my book.

In addition to that, she also writes about her grandmother and great-grandmother, and their stories, which we know is not something Spiegelman was alive during. Again, having written family histories, and family histories of family members not even in my own blood line, I wanted to see how Spiegelman accomplished it. It was done very well, I must admit, though I felt some of the same distance creep into her narrative the same way I found it creeping into my own as I tried to write about my partner's family in Corsica during World War II. It's tough, man. But their stories still deserve to be told. I think Spiegelman and I could have a great chat about how to tell their stories convincingly without feeling like a fraud.

Overall, I really enjoyed this. It wasn't perfect (especially how Spiegelman does not comment much on her obvious privilege), but it was an interesting memoir. I will always say how difficult it is to be a daughter, which Spiegelman captures wonderfully here. Not only is her relationship with her own mother complicated, we see how complicated her mother's relationship was with her mother, etc. etc. Many layers of complicated female relationships here.

I'd be interested in reading anything else Spiegelman writes, but I especially hopes she continues in the creative nonfiction vein - personal narratives, essays, another memoir. I have a feeling she has more to say.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

So many books that I have loved this year have featured complex mother-daughter relationships - My Name is Lucy Barton, Hot Milk, Our Magic Hour, The Portable Veblen etc. This memoir tackles mother-daughter-grandmother-great grandmother memories and their legacies in a completely mesmerising way. I found it so relatable, beautifully nuanced and tender. I spent yesterday with my mother and could not stop talking to her about this book. The four women headliners are brutal, cruel, generous and fascinatingly complex. They lived/are living big, interesting lives. It won't be for everyone but if you're interested in childhood scars, family history and stories and want to interrogate notions of truth, repeating patterns and memory then this book is for you. It was definitely for me.

[Jasna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lange kam das Buch nicht in Fahrt (oder ich nicht),dauernd hab ich die Personen verwechselt. Aber dann hat es mich gepackt. Die ganze Zeit hab ich mich gefragt, wie ein Buch über meine Mutter und mich und ihre Mutter klingen würde. Vermutlich ähnlich melancholisch und herzlich, grausam und rührend. Weil Mutter-Tochter-Beziehungen einfach kompliziert sind.

[Maddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will be back for a review after book club 🤫

30th book of the year!

Okay we finally met on this book so I can leave a review! I'd give this 4.5. I knew I was going to like the book and then I liked it even more than I thought I was going to. Made me think a lot about generational trauma and how memory is kind of...fake but can also bring people together in such a meaningful way. A good reminder that mothers are also people which sounds kind of bad but as kids and sometimes even as adults I think it's sometimes hard to remember that your mom is also a person outside of being your mom and that she also has relationships with other people (including her mom) that you don't know everything about. Super interesting that Spiegelman took more of a journalistic approach to this but I ended up really appreciating that. Read this book if you want to think about motherhood or think about your mother or if you want to be kind of sad.

[Sarah Obsesses over Books & Cookies · Rating 3 out of 5]

started off well...

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

A page-turner of a memoir by Nadja Spiegelman (daughter of Art Spiegelman - author of the graphic novel Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History) examining the relationship between her mother and grandmother.

Inspired to some extent by her father's work, Nadja decides to learn more about her mother's side of the family. This book is actually much more complex of a memoir than described above - Nadja also gives context of her relationship between herself and her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother... etc. The relationships between the women in her family are incredibly complicated (and fractured in some instances) - marred emotional abuse in many instances - and Nadja makes the decision to examine these relationships in greater detail by recording many conversations with her grandmother and her mother over a number of years. In the first half of the book we focus more on her relationship with her own mother, Françoise, and later on she spends time in France getting to know her ageing grandmother, Josée, a former ghost writer. She encounters a number of contradictions between her mother's and her grandmother's memories, and the memoir focuses on how often memories are not quite as we seem, and how events in the past can be misremembered by different people - and the impact this has on the people involved.

I think the reader's enjoyment of this memoir will depend on how much you enjoy reading about other people's families. At times this reminded me of The Mighty Franks: A Memoir, another memoir about complicated family relationships, but I'd still be compelled to recommend this book over Michael Frank's memoir. This did make for uncomfortable reading at times, but I found it fascinating to read how the behaviour in Nadja's family was passed down through the generations, especially in the context of how our memories differ from the facts of the past.

I would definitely have read Maus first if I had known of the connection before I started reading this - now I plan to read it soon to gain a greater understanding of her family history and her father (he doesn't feature much in this book at all). Recommended to fans of memoirs about complex family relationships.

[Lulufrances · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actual rating 4,5
How brave of Nadja Spiegelman to write so unflinchingly and openly about four generations of mother-daughter relationships.
It was painful to read at times and at first I was even put off by the honesty (seems weird, but was true) as it seemed to lay everything bare and I felt ashamed and awkward in place of her family...
And then how beautiful it all comes together, how much love enters the narrative, how much tenderness and understanding.
It baffles me to see how unreliable all narrators were/are and I must say it must be true for us all, everywhere.
(Just thinking about some family stories that I'm certain every member of mine would recall differently in the details as well.)
Memory, what a fickle thing.

This was so much better than I'd expected.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting history of four generations of strong women in the family of Francoise Mouly, the French born New Yorker art director. I expected to read more about the author herself in the book as it is called a memoir, but it really was more about the relationships between the previous generations. Their stories are fascinating and the way they affect each other's lives so deeply is touching and sobering at the same time.

[Yuliya Yurchuk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Просто любов. Я так люблю читати про мам і доньок, а тут аж чотири покоління таких відносин.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be the most honest memoir I've ever read! It's certainly unique--and prescient--about how it views the fallibility of memory.

Nadja Spiegelman starts with her own life, and her tumultuous relationship with her mother, at least when she was a teen. She then interrogates her mother's life and her own dramatic relationship with her mother, and finally she gets the scoop from her grandmother. I believe this approach kinda mirrors what Nadja's father, Art Spiegelman, did with his graphic memoir, "Maus," where he interrogated his father about his Holocaust experience. Shame, shame, I still haven't read it yet.

In fact I read this memoir for my Jewish book club, but N Spiegelman rarely mentioned Judaism. Her focus was much more succinctly on her French, Roman Catholic family, and perhaps that's understandable. Her father already covered the other side of her heritage, and with her mother and grandmother she could explore something new.

I admit, I felt some affinity for these stories of inter-generational disagreement between the female branch. :P It reminds me of certain gives and takes with my own mother (and her with her mother) but Spiegelman's maternal family is much more dramatic than mine ever was. She grew up in a sense of infamy, first from her father's graphic novel success and then because her mother is a famous editor and publisher in her own right. Her maternal grandfather was a famous plastic surgeon. More than that, maybe there's cultural differences to contend with, like lurid, public affairs, boarding schools for so-called sexual deviancy and slapping kids around, runaways, suicide attempts and etc. The daughters often remembered their mothers being cold, gaslighting and emotionally bullying, and of course the mothers had a different take. By giving each of these women space to tell their own stories (and even digging a little into Spiegelman's great and great-great grandmother) everything felt a little more nuanced and less like a soap opera. Most importantly, Spiegelman gave examples about how memory plays with the truth of what happened, but that's what defines our sense of self and relationships.

Also, it makes other memoirs feel more approachable, because the truth is that people don't really remember as much about their lives as they pretend to. :P I love memoirs, because I think they give a off a visceral sense of self, just like fiction can do for created characters. But it's not exactly the genre for hard fact.

But unlike some novels, memoirs are more beholden to certain points of view. One member of my group felt it odd that Spiegelman's aunt, Sylvie, had an intriguing subplot which was ultimately dropped--that's because Spiegelman was interviewing other people, so her aunt was dropped when their stories diverged. This memoir breaks the fourth wall a lot, too, by referencing the writing of itself, hee--that threw a bunch of people, too. I found myself thrown by the quantity of details, and how Spiegelman boomeranged between her different viewpoints. I couldn't keep track of everything, and found myself having to go with it when something I didn't remember was referenced again.

One major reference that my book club all identified with was Spiegelman's 9/11 experience. I think she's a little younger (and occasionally a little older) than most of us. But overall, this memoir wasn't about big world events. Yes, of course Spiegelman referenced the Holocaust, and also World War II, since her grandmother was a teenager when Paris was occupied and liberated. But most of the moments are a lot more domestic and personal. I'm not sure I like the title, which only seems to reference the first half of the book, about daughters feeling wronged by their mothers. The second half is more about reconciliation, or at least about seeing the broader picture. I think this memoir teaches how important it is to see outside of yourself, because even your nearest and dearest always have another certain point of view.

[Kathrin Schröder · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nadja Spiegelman, Was nie geschehen ist, Erscheinungsdatum 09.03.2018

gelesen dank netgalley als ebook (Kindle)

Genre: Belletristik

Vielleicht habe ich dieses Buch unter falschen Voraussetzungen begonnen. Die Tochter von Art Spiegelmann (Maus) schreibt eine Familiengeschichte der weiblichen Linie. Vielleicht habe ich hieraus und aus dem Titel Themen hineingedeutet, die das Buch in Wirklichkeit nicht vorgibt zu behandeln.

Selten habe ich ein Buch zu Ende gelesen mit dem ich so wenig warm geworden bin oder vielmehr mit dessen Personen (allen) ich nicht warm geworden bin.

Nadja, die Tochter, befragt Mutter und Großmutter und lässt sich deren Leben erzählen. Die Erzählperson wechselt, manchmal kapitelweise, manchmal direkt von Absatz zu Absatz. Stellenweise musste ich zurück blättern um mir sicher zu sein, wer gerade erzählt. Keine der drei Frauen hat es geschafft in mir wirkliche Gefühle hervorzurufen - alle drei erzählen, korrigieren sich, korrigieren die anderen und feilen die Wahrheit und die Erinnerung anhand der eigenen Vorstellung. Selbst in liebevollen Szenen ist die Darstellung einer Geschichte immer wieder ein Kampf um den eigenen Blick darauf. Zahlen, Daten, Fakten, anwesende Personen und das Geschehen werden von Mutter und Großmutter gebogen oder gebrochen. Inwieweit die Tochter dieses Verhalten auch hat, ist nicht erkennbar, da sie als Ich-Erzählerin die Fäden in der Hand hat. Gleiche Geschichten werden wiederholt, neu erarbeitet, neu verarbeitet. Mich hat nichts davon berührt, wenig davon hat Bedeutung erlangt und ich habe in diesem Buch weder Persönlichkeiten noch große Ereignisse oder bis auf eine einzige Formulierung berührende Sprache gefunden.

Das Konzept: "Der Reiher ist gesehen worden." Ist das Einzige was für mich hier hängen bleibt.
#WasNieGeschehenIst #NetGalleyDE

[Danielle McClellan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book explores the complex lives of several generations of women. The young, talented author is determined to present a brutally honest portrait of her mother, her grandmother, and even her great-grandmother--and brutal it is as she pulls long-buried stories into the light. Like most of us, despite the love that they feel for one another, each of these women is staunch in defending her bulwarks, and often mired in her own complex history of resentment and pain. There are a few sections that feel written by an extremely precocious teenager, as the author is not always able to avoid tallying up her own still-raw slights and wins, and inserting her own desires into the stories shared with her, but ultimately, the commitment and deep attention that she invests in writing about her family creates an honest and brave account of several fascinating women. We need more of these biographies that look unflinchingly at the lives of women in their every particularity.

[Zara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so unexpected and lovely. The stories of mothers and daughters, and how memory is a shifty thing, rang so true to me. As a daughter (and now a mother) in a family who loves telling our stories, I thought a lot about which versions become truth and which just sort of evaporate.

Also: the author is a Stuy graduate, a year younger than me, and there is a small section about 9/11 that was written about as clearly and honestly as I've ever read anything about my (collective) experience of that day. It hurt a little.

Also also: Spiegelman's talent exists on its own, but I couldn't help thinking about how much I love her father's "Maus," and how they both have an incredible gift for telling stories that make the reader feel present, even though the authors weren't even there themselves.

[Erlesenes.Zerlesenes [Berit] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses Buch erforscht das komplexe Leben mehrerer Generationen von Frauen.

Die junge, talentierte Autorin ist fest entschlossen, ein brutal ehrliches Porträt ihrer Mutter, ihrer Großmutter und sogar ihrer Urgroßmutter zu präsentieren - und brutal ist es, wenn sie lang verschüttete Geschichten ans Licht zerrt.

Wie die meisten von uns verteidigt jede dieser vier Frauen trotz der Liebe, die sie füreinander empfinden, standhaft ihre eigenen Erinnerungs-Bollwerke und ist oft in ihrer eigenen komplexen Geschichte voller Ressentiments und Schmerz verstrickt.

Es gibt einige Abschnitte, die sich anfühlen, als hätte sie ein extrem frühreifer Teenager geschrieben, denn die Autorin kann es nicht immer vermeiden, ihre eigenen, noch unausgegorenen Kränkungen und Triumphe aufzurechnen und ihre eigenen Wünsche in die mit ihr geteilten Geschichten einzubringen.
Aber letztendlich schaffen das Engagement und die große Aufmerksamkeit, die sie in das Schreiben über ihre Familie investiert, einen ehrlichen und mutigen Bericht über mehrere faszinierende Frauen.

Wir brauchen mehr solcher Biografien, die das Leben von Frauen in allen Besonderheiten und Facetten in den Blick nehmen.

[holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

up there with in the dream house as a contender for my favorite memoir of all time. will stay with me for years and be reread many times i'm sure. wow.

"adolescence was the state of being ripped apart by two desires of an equal intensity: to be rid of your parents and to be loved by your parents, to become an adult and to remain a child. and suicide, suicide was the perfect paradox that allowed you both."

[Sem · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chronicle of three generations of Spiegelman females and the way they influenced each other

tl;dr at Overall, as always

Any comic book fan knows who Art Spiegelman and Vladek Spiegelman are, their lives examined in Maus in heartbreaking detail. But that's only one side of the prolific Spiegelmans, the male side. What about the women of the house?

The memoir concerns Josee, the grandmother, Francoise, the mother, and Nadja herself, the daughter, the writer, and the one who wants to uncover all the bruises and pain that accumulated over the past years of unpleasant gender politics, unhappy relationships, and ugly memories.
Memory, in particular, is a major theme, as Francoise recounts the verbal abuse she endured, the crushing loneliness she felt in a large family, and the dark secrets that Josee just doesn't seem to recognize.
Repression is a powerful recurring motif, as the women tell of iffy sexual encounters and mothers deny certain events ever happening even while the daughters rememer them vividly.

It is surreal to see a rich family be so unhappy and live through so many bizzarre occurences, a sobering reminder that all those novels about tragic nouveau riches are not just speculative but rooted in reality. Rapes, abortions, unrequited love, abusive relationships, grief, and desires to be whole again are scattered throughout history and in the chapters. It's a tough narrative to face, made even more difficult by the fact that this is not fiction, these are real people that did bad things, had bad things done to them. And yet they still love each other, even if in a strange strained way.

This all makes the book sound unpleasant and it is, but intentionally so. Spiegelman is not afraid to ask tough questions, get scary answers, and reveal everything that she has to in order to show the full truth. What's most remarkable though is her talent to take this grim book and fill it with moments of joy, laughter, and genuine familial happiness. What could have been a depressing discussion of her family's dirty laundry turns into an affectionate portrait of the great women that bear the Spiegelman name.

What makes this book stand out is Nadja's readiness to face her own flaws and criticize them, admit that her mother, her idol, is not a model of good parenting, and take down the veil between private and public. She is bold, feminine, and ready for a frank conversation. More than some other people might offer you.

Overall, a deeply intimate, sometimes uncomfortably so, portrait of an imperfect family and its falls and rises throughout the years. A work that's interesting for the reader but actually important for the writer, a therapy book, so to speak, once again proving that reality is stranger than fiction.

[Tristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating journey seen through the lens of a girl trying to understand her narcissistic mother, grandmother and even great-grandmother. I don't think the author would choose that word to describe her matrilineal line, and yet every story she shares falls deeply into that groove. She is on the outside, looking into their memories of the past, trying to put the pieces together to make a coherent "truthful" story, but "the truth" is impossible to find when everyone involved is constantly re-writing history to make them look better, stronger, smarter or more damaged.

I cringed so many times, as Nadja (the author) tries to make sense of conflicting stories, while simultaneously running the gauntlet of being judged for her weight, her clothes, and her own memories of the past. The book is brilliantly written and she skillfully weaves the story through time and space with grace and ease, and yet she never seems to step out of the story to acknowledge how deeply she is being manipulated by these women in her family. In fact, by the end of the book, she feels triumphant in somehow "winning" her grandmother's love, which many children of narcissists who have found some recovery and healing know, is an illusion and a trap.

And really, the entire book is a "See? I'm a good daughter!" offering to the women in her family. It's heartbreaking watching Nadja scramble around, navigating what she is writing and trying to "not upset" her mother and grandmother. She is also trying to do what so many children of narcissists do — she is trying to unpack and understand the memories of her childhood. She's trying to figure out if things happened the way she remembered them, or the way her mother or grandmother told her she should remember them. This is particularly brutal when she speaks to the inappropriate sexual behavior she was exposed to as a child and teenager. But through the entire book, Nadja holds a steady strength and perseverance, which keeps the thread of her story and journey interesting.

In many ways, this is a vanity book that misses the deep epiphany and healing that might come from realizing the constant manipulation has endured by the women in her family, but she never gets there (although she has glimmers that I, as the reader clung to). But it's so beautifully written, heartfelt and dynamic that it almost doesn't really matter that she never gets there. It's a deep, engrossing read and I look forward to reading more of her writing.

[Isabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

TW: pedophilia, parental neglect and abuse, child neglect and abuse, rape, sexual assault, homophobia, war

I saw all the ways in which she worked to be a very different mother from her own. And I also saw how much the past, so long kept secret, pulled us into formations like a deep ocean current, from so far below that we barely knew we were not moving on our own.

I think because I've been wanting to read this for years, I created expectations in my mind for what the book would be about. And that was my mistake.

Nadja Spiegelman is an excellent writer, her voice immediately pulls you into this generational story about the women in her family. It hurt to see myself and my relationship with my mother reflected in the author's experiences. Mother and daughter relationships are so complex and I'm always eager to read more from someone else's experience.

What I found most interesting was how our memories are shaped as time goes by and we grow as a person. We are our own unreliable narrators, with our own version of history. You saw this throughout the book as each woman tries to recount their story, only to be met with another version. Nadja may remember how an event happened but her mother remembers it differently.

However, what absolutely bothered me is how her parents failed her. I know it wasn't Nadja's intention to be that through this book, but it sickens me to see friends of her parents hitting on her, a man wrote to her father saying he'd like to fuck his daughter, and her father just laughed about it.

Her mother also wasn't protected by her own parents, and it hurts to see her excuse a man's behavior when it comes to her own daughter.

is a memoir about the relationship between mother and daughter, and granddaughter. A parent's job is to protect their children but, in the end, all they can do is try. There is no protection from the past and your parents' flaws.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Frustratingly, this didn't work at all for me. I guess the silver lining is that I realize how much skill it takes to write an effective memoir, but Spiegelman falls into the "and this happened, then this happened, and then this happened" trap without really reconciling these traumatic events.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sharp account of memory, motherhood (and daughterhood - is that a word?), and transitions. Beautiful and page-turning, I loved Spiegelman's voice, though she seemed to step back towards the end. Still, a brave and honest chronicle that I won't soon forget.

[Heather Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this memoir. Full of dualities in intergenerational relationships between women and it dances a gorgeous line of fact and fiction, particularly how reliable (or unreliable) our memories can be.