Triumph of love, care, camaraderie
Siobhan Harvey finds a painful memoir strangely enjoyable.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that Nadja Spiegelman, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and editor Art Spiegelman, became an author. If so, then perhaps it’s also unavoidable that her new memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, would, like Dad’s most famous offering, Maus, deal with controversial subjects.
For where Maus uncompromisingly confronts the atrocities of the Holocaust, this book tackles the dysfunctions and disasters of motherdaughter relationships, namely her own. Sometimes intimate, sometimes visceral, the reader is often confronted by how painful and profound the personal can be.
Not an easy read then. From her traumatic puberty to vicious sibling rivalry, the author meticulously charts each fraught engagement with her publisher-designer mother Francois. Yet what triumphs over these most private of Speigelman’s exposures is love. Mother-daughter: it is the innate camaraderie and care attached to this bond which wins out.
This is because at the core of the book is a search for deep understanding. Constant snubbing, verbal abuse, geographical exile: in also recording the trauma of Francois’ relationship with her cold mother, the author offers correlations between the actions of those closest to her.
In this, there’s an overwhelming sense that often men – the author’s grandfather, father and brother – in this narrative are less scrutinised, less censured.
Like being a fly on the wall during a ‘‘no-holds barred’’ domestic, this book is the literary equivalent of witnessing ongoing agony. For such uncompromising honesty, it’s an indispensable read.