I'm Supposed To Protect You From All This: A Memoir - Softcover

"Is it better, though, to accept that love and anger can co-exist; and that, particularly in mother-daughter relationships, such dynamics and dramas are frequently played out in the body, in attitudes towards lovers, food, appearance? Nadja cannot answer these questions definitively - who could? - but she can pose them arrestingly and illuminatingly." - The Guardian

"A fascinating, gracefully written glimpse into the complexities of family life." -Kirkus Reviews

"[A] penetrating memoir... this intricate family tale evokes a growing sense that forgiveness and love are ultimately far more important than facts." --Publishers Weekly

"Nadja Spiegelman's memoir 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

"I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else's story, writes Nadja Spiegelman, whose birth was marked by an asterisk in her father's immortal Maus. I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This unpacks that asterisk into an astonishing memoir, a dense branching forest where the lives of daughters, mothers, and grandmothers intersect, tangle, and separate in a way I have never seen before. 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

"This stunning memoir of mothers and daughters blew me away with its beauty and honesty. At once unflinching in its exploration of maternal cruelty and unabashed about the wonders of a mother's love, it manages to capture the complexity of that bond like nothing else I've ever read. An extraordinary achievement." --J. Courtney Sullivan, author of The Engagements

"In this mesmerizing book, Nadja Spiegelman sets out to understand the women in her family her French mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, who expected little from men, wouldn't dare ask intimate questions of their elders, and were more preoccupied with war than introspection. Spiegelman's prose is witty, tender, assured and poetic, and her investigation progresses like memory itself, a realm in which nothing quite hangs together but everything makes sense. The unexpected symmetries between the generations, as well as the inevitable insults and pains, make this artful memoir feel like the story of every family." --Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

"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 about three generations of women and what each of them remembers." --Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World

"A beautiful and thoughtful memoir about the author's relationship with her mother, her mother's relationship with her grandmother, and her grandmother's relationship with her great-grandmother. Raising questions of memory and family, it is a book I'll be thinking about for a long time." - Favourite Feminist Reads from 2016, Feminist Writers Festival

"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." --The Guardian

"This is a special read that refuses to simplify or soften the pain and pleasure of the mother-daughter relationship." --Elle

"Spiegelman is masterful at loading up her language with more meaning than is at first apparent." --Slate

"Nadja Spiegelman has written a richly detailed memoir about the contradictory life narratives that connect and divide four generations of women on her mother's side." - New York Times

"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 Spiegelman's I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This shimmers with elegance, mystery, and danger. It is a memoir of mothers and daughters, traced through four generations, as well as a study of memory and the stories we tell to create (and preserve) our sense of self. " - Lifted Brow

"The motif of waves and water is ever present throughout I'm Supposed To Protect You From All This... Much as the ocean demands a response from even those wading in the shallows, Spiegelman presents the notion of motherhood as a reflexive one." - Kill Your Darlings

"Any suspicions one might harbour of Spiegelman resting on the laurels of such an illustrious literary inheritance are immediately swept aside as you read her work. She proves herself more than worthy of comparison with her father, fully grasping the risks and the rewards of her chosen genre...I haven't read a better memoir all year." --The National

"Spiegelman often creat[es] scenes as a novelist would, while also detailing the way her life has unfolded. Sophisticated, sharp, poignant and eminently readable." - The Age

"With this fiercely female chain of stories, Spiegelman has decided to plunge right into the most intimate and radioactive psychic material most women have on hand... What Ferrante did for female friends - exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold - Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters." -Slate

"Spiegelman's sagely poetic memoir is maybe best described as the biography of a mother seen through the eyes of a daughter. Spiegelman explores what it is to become a woman born of strong women, how firm and porous are the boundaries between the generations, how enduring and mutable is the invincibility (and the vulnerability) a woman passes down to her daughter. Spiegelman's intimate portrait of female identity and idolatry is intelligent, forthright and heartbreaking. Her sentences will haunt me forever." --Heidi Julavits, author of The Folded Clock

A HEARTBREAKING MEMOIR FROM THE DAUGHTER OF ART SPIEGELMAN, THE CREATOR OF MAUS

A major addition to Autumn 2016's literary memoirs, I'M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU... has already drawn praise from Sheila Heti, Siri Hustvedt and Elif Batuman.

More than Nadja Spiegelman's 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.