I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir
Written by Nadja Spiegelman
Narrated by Nadja Spiegelman
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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Reviews for I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
15 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Author Nadja Spiegelman is the daughter of famous graphic novelist Art Spiegelman (Maus) and New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This is sort of a memoir/autobiography/biography of Nadja, her mother Françoise, her grandmother Josée, and her great-grandmother Mina, presented mostly as conversations about the subject’s memories of themselves and each other (Mina is no longer present but her life is described by her survivors). The narrators are unreliable; when Nadja does some fact-checking after a conversation she often finds events couldn’t have taken place as described. But the feelings come across as authentic even if the memories do not. The women have tough lives - they have to put up with cheating lovers, intolerant parents, rebellious children, economic deprivation, and the Second World War – yet they triumph magnificently over all this. There’s quite a bit of generational conflict; the older ladies sometimes have a hard time understand what the younger ones are up to – yet even if there’s a lack of understanding there’s amused acceptance. Not the kind of book I normally read, but interesting and endearing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Die Geschichte ihrer Familie, genauer gesagt, die Geschichte ihrer Mutter und ihrer Großmutter hat Nadja schon immer fasziniert, zu viele weiße Stellen, Ungereimtheiten und unglaubliche Begebenheiten hat sie gehört, weshalb sie als Erwachsene beginnt, nachzufragen, zu forschen und sie aufzuschreiben. Entstanden ist das Bild einer Frau, die nie geliebt wurde, die Außenseiterin in der eigenen Familie war und früh die Flucht ergriffen hat. Doch es gibt auch eine andere Seite, die Geschichte der Großmutter, die ebenfalls unter ihrer eigenen exzentrischen Mutter gelitten hatte. Mehrere Generationen Frauen, die nie ausgesprochen haben, was geschehen war und sich nun in diesem Buch ihrer Vergangenheit stellen.Nadja Spiegelman ist die Tochter von Art Spiegelman, der seinerseits für „Maus“ den Pulitzer Prize gewonnen hat, einem Comic, der ebenfalls die Familiengeschichte erzählt. In diesem Kontext ist es nicht mehr ganz so verwunderlich, dass eine junge Frau eine doch schmerzliche Biographie ihrer Mutter vorlegt, die noch lebt und sich ihrer eigenen Geschichte stellen muss. Dadurch, dass Spiegelman die Lebensgeschichte mit ihrer eigenen verwebt, zeigt sie immer wieder Parallelen zwischen der Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart auf, die auch durch unterschiedliche Länder und Zeiten stabil sind.Vieles in Spiegelmans Familiengeschichte ist auch für den Leser schmerzlich und man fragt sich, wie Familienmitglieder auf diese Weise miteinander umgehen können. Vor allem das wiederkehrende Motiv der Mütter, ihre Töchter auf ihr Aussehen und ihre Essgewohnheiten zu reduzieren ist augenfällig. Auch die Dichotomie zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit, wenn es um den Körper geht, fand ich eher seltsam gelöst in der Familie, was auch zu erheblicher Unsicherheit der jungen Frauen führte. Vor allem Françoise leidet unter der Ablehnung und fehlenden Zuneigung ihrer Mutter. Die ältere Schwester wurde immer bevorzugt, was die jüngere durch extreme Leistungen versucht zu kompensieren, um so Aufmerksamkeit zu erringen. Ein weiterer Aspekt der Erzählung schwebt über dem gesamten Bericht und stellt vieles immer wieder in Frage: wie historisch korrekt sind die Erinnerungen, die die Menschen haben? Haben sich die Ereignisse wirklich so zugetragen oder wird durch die Zeit und die eigene perspektive das Erlebte verfälscht und fügt sich zu einem stimmigen Bild, das womöglich gar nicht der Realität entspricht? Immer wieder steht Nadja vor diesem Problem: Einzelne Aspekte passen zeitlich und örtlich nicht, das Gesamtbild ist nicht stimmig und Mutter und Großmutter erinnern dasselbe Ereignis gänzlich verschieden. An dieser Stelle stritt Erzählen an Erinnern – dies kann versöhnen und das eigene Leben für die jeweilige Person erträglicher machen.