I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir

I read this book because I was intrigued by some clips from interviews I had seen of Francoise Mouly. We are about the same age and I too have an art background as well as an artistic daughter, in her late twenties, who grew up in Brooklyn. Although I am not nearly as driven and successful as Mouly, I felt some stabs of jealousy when watching the interviews. I needed more information, at least to quell my envy. I have admired Art Spiegelman for many years and picked up Maus to reread at the beginning of the pandemic. This prompted me to purchase I'm Supposed to Protect You... I can only rave about Nadja Spiegelman's memoir. I loved the way she wove in and out of the past, present and future, connecting trauma and character traits between generations. She is vulnerable and exposes her point of view as child. Her simple response, "oh" to her mother's articulate insistence that everything is fictional and truth does not really exist. The author's bravery to explore her maternal grandmother's childhood in Paris during the Nazi Occupation and not be overshadowed by her father's mother's tragic death by suicide after surviving the Nazi deathcamps. The book is beautifully written, hip, insightful and empathic to all of the personalities that impacted on her own character.

I have read many memoirs and many memoirs about mothers and daughters but Nadja Spiegelman’s I’M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU FROM ALL OF THIS is so unique in that Ms.  Spiegelman has the opportunity to explore her relationship with her mother not just from her perspective but from her mother’s and her maternal grandmother’s – by actually interviewing them both for the book. She records her conversations with these two interesting, yet flawed women who have both caused great turmoil in how their childhood memories have been shaped and how they relate to each other as adults. There are discoveries along the way and much healing through Spiegelman’s process – for all. They come to know each other better. What child, now an adult, wouldn’t love the opportunity to ask their parents telling questions as they relate to their upbringing, and find out more about what makes them tick, how they were raised, what secrets they might have hidden, and how they can come to know them better. As a child, who no longer has living parents, I now especially long to have certain questions answered and I can only imagine what the answers might be. This book offers an interesting perspective and gives the reader the opportunity to think about his/her parents in a different way, as well as to see how one generation shapes the next. There is a lot of sorrow. It is not at all a rosy picture, far from it, but an exploration of understanding who parents are and who their parents were.

This memoir, an intensely personal story, is at its core an ode to compassion. Through the troubled and often antagonizing relationships between three generations of mother, daughter and granddaughter, Nadja explores the subjectivity of memory, and how relationships hinge on the competing narratives that these memories hold. Through interviews with her mother and grandmother along with personal disclosure, Nadja shows us each woman's relationship to the memories of a shared events. The indignation over a memory one feels is forgotten all together by another. The structure of the book masterfully parallels this idea of disjointed memories. The events of ones life becomes a collection of moments experienced and interpreted. This is why every page of reading the book opens up a mental dialogue for the reader. You cannot help but re-analyse the memories you yourself put precedence on. You realize that your version of a conflict is necessarily different than the other parties. You understand how generational faults are passed down. Nadja exposes these truths the best way one can, by writing a literary story with compelling characters and elegant prose. "I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This" is not just a good read. It is a moral read and it is an important read.

Having taught Maus several times, I had grown fond of the Spiegelman family and wanted to know more about them. In this memoir Art Spiegelman's daughter Nadja explores her French mother's side of the family. They are a wildly eccentric bunch, both the women and the men (Nadja's grandfather, a plastic surgeon, comes across as a lecherous satyr). There's trauma aplenty in each generation, different from that endured by the Spiegelmans in the Holocaust but terrible nonetheless. As an author, Nadja is perhaps too young and too involved to be the conveyer of the family dirty laundry. The book comes across as something composed in bursts of frenzy on a laptop; it would have benefitted from a firm editor to pare it down. Still, it is fascinating to get the passionate back story of Nadja's mother, Françoise Mouly, who in Maus appears as the voice of reason.

Absolutely loved this book I couldn’t put it down! I read it in 3 days! Holy crap my prospective has changed!

if you enjoy books about family and how they interact with each other then this book will really get you thinking about your own family interactions. This memoir will provoke you to research things about your family history.

Any mother, any daughter, anyone searching for truth or answers in the past - anyone trying to understand a mother or a daughter - should love this beautiful memoir. I've cried and laughed, stopped to think, remembering so many things myself, and ended with the sad but delightful realization that there are no shared memories, no shared pasts. We create and recreate ourselves again and again throughout our lives and no one can take that away - how wonderful.

I enjoyed the book. I did. But I have to admit that I was expecting a conclusion or at least a final revelation. There isn't one. It doesn't stop the memoir from being interesting; it just makes it a little disjointed.

Fesselndes Buch! Sehr guter Stil!

tres bien

I was hooked the moment I started. The character development was rich and the author really brought the best and worst out of everyone beautifully.

I heard Nadja Spiegelman talk on radio 4 about this book and went out and bought it. It is absolutely beautiful and moving. For anyone who has family secrets, difficult relationships, particularly with their mothers, this book will really speak to you. It is written with such honesty and tenderness, truly a wonderful book which will be re-read in years to come, and given to my daughter. What a testament to human resilience in the face of difficult circumstances, and the ability to heal through understanding and forgiveness. I think this is a truly remarkable book.I would be interested in a book about Spiegelman's father's side now. I think it would have an equal power and weight. Unfortunately her paternal grandmother killed herself and many of her father\s family were killed in the Holocaust.

Nadja Spiegelman's father is Art Spiegelman, creator of the ground-breaking graphic novel series, 'Maus', about the holocaust and his family's history. Yet this memoir is about the equally interesting and complicated lives of Nadja's mother and grandmother, about the relationships between the three women and their wider family, and the unreliability of memory. It is beautifully written, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, but always engaging. If you have a love for either France or New York or both, you will also get a kick out of the descriptions of life in those two places.