Maman dearest
“Survival is having children even if they hate you.” So wrote Art Spiegelman, author-illustrator of the 1991 blockbuster “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” The first graphic novel ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, “Maus” was based on interviews with Spiegelman’s harsh Holocaust-survivor father, as much a dissection of their fraught relationship as a condemnation of the horrors of Auschwitz. “My anger against [my father] was so free-floating and easy to access,” Spiegelman wrote, “that it was just our leitmotif.”
If the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons, so are the sins of the mothers, grandmothers and greatgrandmothers visited upon the daughters. In this first book by Art Spiegelman’s daughter, those sins are cause for a fierce exhumation of the author’s maternal lineage. Five years old when her father won the Pulitzer, Nadja Spiegelman writes that “the spotlight of his fame projected a larger-than-life version of him to the world ... But inside our home, it was my mother who loomed large.”
Throughout the author’s childhood, her mother — who had fled Paris for New York to escape her own troubled French family, then become a woman about town and, ultimately, art director at the New Yorker — was Nadja’s protector and idol. But as Nadja’s teenage body ripened, the entanglement between her and her adored maman turned ugly.
“My body was dangerous not only to me but to others. I saw this in the wariness with which my mother had begun to treat me . ... One evening might pass without incident, then the next she would call me to the kitchen, shaking with fury, and accuse me of opening a second container of milk . ... When my mother was angry, the anger consumed her.”
In the wake of her tortured adolescence, Nadja undertook a research project that echoed her father’s: She began interviewing her mother, in hopes of understanding how her greatest ally had become her enemy combatant. What Nadja learned about her mother’s childhood sent her flying to Paris to interview her grandmother Josée about the mother-daughter enmity that seemed to have been passed down in each successive mother’s milk.
Josée agreed to be interviewed on one condition: Nadja had to first persuade Art Spiegelman to remove all mention of Josée’s mother from future editions of “Maus.”
“‘Where do you think I would be,’ he asked, ‘if I’d left out of my books the parts that made people uncomfortable?’ My father and I rarely disagreed. His words stung.”
Reluctantly, Art Spiegelman agreed; the deal was struck. But the ferocious honesty with which Nadja Spiegelman tells her story and those of her female progenitors indicates that she took her father’s critique to heart. Recounting decades of multigenerational emotional, physical and sexual abuse, Nadja spares no wince-worthy detail, protecting no one. Neither her lyricism nor the stylistic liberties she takes with the memoir’s structure, bouncing around in time as actual memory does, can soften the impact of what the mothers in Nadja Spiegelman’s family did to their daughters.
Paradoxically, the greatest success of this poetic, searing memoir lies in its universality. What mother has not hated her child in at least one terrible moment; what daughter has not, for at least one terrible moment, wished her mother dead?
Spiegelman’s memoir is beautiful, not perfect. In a book populated by so many unreliable narrators, the reader longs for the author to rise above the fray, pointing the reader toward the truth — if such a thing exists — when her progenitors’ memories clash. That said, “I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This” is a compelling first effort by a 29-year-old who refuses to protect herself, or her readers, from the complexities and cruelties of motherhood.