I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, Nadja Spiegelman

I discovered the existence of this book when, before class, I was hastily googling to find the page number in Maus where Spiegelman mentions his daughter’s birth in a footnote. I found it, but I also found something entirely unexpected: her book! I glanced through some reviews that reassured me that this was not just some celebrity child tell-all, but a really compelling and fascinating memoir (and, nota bene, one where her father is barely mentioned), and they were right; it’s a really interesting work.

This is an exploration of the relationships between mothers and daughters, and grandmothers and granddaughters, and how the latter can sometimes be simpler and less fraught than the former. It’s really impressive, how she manages to see these relationships from various angles and in incredibly nuanced ways — that she can recognize, for example, the pain she feels when her grandmother comments on her appearance, and the kinds of pressures such commentary exerts, but can also describe these interactions without demonization or blame. She has a remarkable ability to be compassionate with both others and herself, without sugar-coating or excusing harm.

What she’s trying to get at here are the individual lives of four different women — herself, and her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, while also observing how they mutually shape and inflect one another (and how they resist doing so). In the US, especially these days, motherhood is such a central and rapacious component of identity that a woman’s insistence that she has a life (and desires!) that is separate from her child(ren) is often construed as unnatural, cruel. Or at least, so it seems to me. My family history is similar to Nadja Spiegelman’s, in that I also come from a line of fiercely independent, stubborn women, all of them fiercely attached to their daughters, but also passionately committed to their own pursuits, intellectual and/or political. So I deeply related to this book, and also found the complexities of the various relationships very familiar. My grandmother has been writing her own memoir, and the story of her family, in recent years, and so she and I have been having these wonderful conversations about her mother, and it’s this kind of layering — of seeing all of these women as both mother and child, and noticing how with time, these generations also become peers, in a sense, as they reflect on each other, considering their various beliefs and decisions from new angles — that this book accomplishes so brilliantly.

But although it’s really, centrally, about women’s lives, it’s also more broadly about the vagaries of memory, and how we tell stories about our lives, and make sense of them. Perhaps most interesting to me, in retrospect, is the subtle way she probes the question of history. There are a few moments where the painful contrast between the fates of the two different sides of her family during the Second World War is mentioned, but overall, it’s an area where she treads lightly. And you sense why, in the discussion of how upset her grandmother is over something Nadja says about her great-grandmother’s wartime experiences in an earlier published work. These are difficult topics. I am pondering them myself. I wonder if she’ll write more about this aspect in the future (I wonder if I will, too). But, in a reminder that it’s not only the older generations who have lived through “Big” historical events, also described in the book are the experiences of a high-schooler in Manhattan on 9/11. There is far less of Nadja Spiegelman’s adult life than you might expect in her memoir: even at the end, you feel, clearly, that she is still a young woman. But this is not by any means a detriment. If anything, it makes the emotional maturity of the book all the more impressive. And it also emphasizes that she is not the central focus of the book. This is the rare autobiography that, though extremely specific and individual, also really speaks more abstractly to a larger human experience. It’s a really compelling book.