Bonds between mothers and daughters are often full of complicated twists and turns. Add in the mother's great achievements and a famous father, and the relationship can turn from complicated to downright ugly, especially when family history is subject to the shifting sands of time and memory. Unearthing those memories is what Eisner-nominated graphic novelist Nadja Spiegelman (Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework) sets out to do in I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This.
Young Nadja knew little about her mother, New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly, except the peripherals: that she left Paris at 18 to live in a squalid SoHo loft, and eventually married Maus creator Art Spiegelman. The mother known for smothering her children with affection in their childhood and indulging in antics like swimming during lightning storms eventually abandoned her daughter emotionally in adolescence, leaving a void that Nadja could neither understand nor reconcile. It wasn't until her daughter reached adulthood that Françoise finally unleashed her past: the neglected middle daughter in post-World War II Paris, whose high-society parents waged household skirmishes, pitting one child against the other until only emotional pain remained. As Nadja discovers by unraveling and reconstructing the hidden layers of memory and misunderstandings, that family pattern repeated itself across three successive generations: "The past reshaped the present, but the present also reshaped the past."
The "happy" ending that Nadja finds is acceptance, where the main players don't forgive and forget but meet on middle ground. It's this honesty in human emotion--what Nadja comes to term "the violent act" of interpreting memories--that ultimately gives her memoir its strength. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant