I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again.

Well past the age when most children stop believing in magic, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father,Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—Paris-bornNew Yorker art director Francoise Mouly—seemed to possess superhuman powers, both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja emerged into an early adolescence and her body “began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” the tensions between them deepened. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told, beyond shadowy disclosures that quickly dead-ended into “I’m supposed to protect you from all that.” It wasn’t until she graduated from college that her mother finally opened up to her about her upbringing, as the daughter of a flamboyant nouveau-riche plastic surgeon and his volatile wife, who too readily made their children pawns in their tempestuous relationship.

It had taken an ocean to allow Francoise enough distance to break free and reinvent herself in New York, which she did with a vengeance. Now, at not much more than the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, returning to Paris determined to fill in the blanks and to resolve the contradictions in her mother’s account. But while she learned that where mothers and daughters are concerned, clean beginnings and endings are impossible, she emerged with this dramatic and moving multigenerational narrative and a deeper understanding of why those who love us best sometimes hurt us most.

I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This is a book in which every woman will see herself and her mother, and how they glorify, vilify, distort, misunderstand, and, ultimately, if they are lucky, make their peace with the past and allow each other to become, imperfectly, themselves.