I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

May 30, 2016
The author, daughter of Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly, a publisher and acclaimed art director at the New Yorker, places her family—particularly its women—under a high-powered microscope in this penetrating memoir. As a child, Speigelman often sensed that her mother’s family was “dangerous,” but her inquiries were brushed aside by the independent and hard-working Mouly, who suggested that she would enlighten her daughter at a later time. When Mouly finally sits down to describe her life in detail, the protective gloves come off. In heart-to-heart talks with her mother and with her grandmother (Josee, a divorcee who lives on a houseboat on the Seine) that take place over a number of years, Spiegelman probes the undercurrent of uneasiness she’s felt her whole life. Mouly fled her Parisian family at age 18, moving to New York to escape her mother’s criticism as well as her father’s inappropriate behaviors; she eventually turned her critical eye on her own daughter, who struggled with compulsive eating and other issues. When Spiegelman begins interviewing her grandmother, however, she finds a loving woman who doesn’t fit Mouly’s recollections. Memories overlap and contradict as the author unwinds the past; even some of Spiegelman’s memories, she realizes, may be imagined. As the three women own and apologize for past and present mistakes and misunderstandings, this intricate family tale evokes a growing sense that forgiveness and love are ultimately far more important than facts.

October 31, 2016
With two prominent intellectual parents (cartoonist Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, and Françoise Mouly, New Yorker art editor, graphic novel publisher, and recipient of numerous artistic awards), Spiegelman must grapple with her legacy but finds the more challenging endeavor to be reconciling the barrier between her mother and herself. She traces her life in contrast to her mother to see the lines of difference, but she also comes to learn the ways in which they are more alike than she imagined. In the audio edition, Spiegelman wavers in her reading. At times, her delivery drones on without much inflection and energy. In other sections, and particularly those with dialogue, her voice becomes lively with emphasis and emotion. Her most impressive feat in narrating comes with her seamless shifts into French accents and even French itself as she moves through conversations in her mother’s native tongue. A Riverhead hardcover.