“How do you master your femininity with something that makes you powerful?” says Nadja Spiegelman over lunch in a French restaurant in Boston. It’s a question at the heart of her memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This (Riverhead), which explores the psychic legacy passed between four generations of fascinatingly self-made women, including her mother, New Yorker art director and children’s book publisher Françoise Mouly, with freshness and sophistication.
For the exuberantly haired 29-year-old, also the author of a trio of graphic novels for children, storytelling is both birthright and necessity. Her father is the Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, whose landmark graphic memoir, Maus, grounded in interviews with his Holocaust survivor father, grappled with the complexities of narrating the past. But it was Mouly who was the star of Nadja’s childhood, a seemingly magical fairy creature who installed rope ladders and a trapeze in their Soho loft and started her own publishing company, who dove into choppy seas during electric storms, dismissing fear of risk as something for “timid women who washed their vegetables.”
As Nadja neared adolescence and her “body began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” a more troubled side of her glamorous mother emerged, with Nadja herself a target. Most bewildering of all were Mouly’s denials that their arguments had even occurred. “My mother condensed whole swaths of our shared past into a sharp tool that ordered our present,” the author writes. As a teenager, she was so uncertain of her own version of events that she began to mark diary pages that detailed their arguments with a circled R to remind herself that they were real.
It was in Anne Fadiman’s class at Yale that Nadja began writing seriously, wading through the slippery marshlands of truth and memory. Thus began an open-ended conversation that reached back to Mouly’s own difficult teenage years in France, and her reasons for moving alone to New York in the 1970s. “I saw this incredibly powerful woman who did not care what anybody else thought about her, just whatever she wanted she could make a reality, and the idea of her feeling that lost and vulnerable was so fascinating to me—and also in a strange way so helpful because I kept seeking road maps to her,” Nadja recalls. Her senior thesis juxtaposed her own coming of age in Soho with her mother’s in France. When she approached Mouly about expanding it into a book, she responded with a level of candor that’s “rare even in the privacy of one’s own mind,” Nadja continues. “There was this moment when the barriers between us fell and not only was I able to see her as little girl but she was able to see me as an adult who was ready to hear these things.” Demanding a similar intimacy of herself, the book includes a vivid account of September 11, when Nadja was a student at Stuyvesant High School, as well as her first forays into sexual identity.
But that turned out to be only the beginning of the story. When Nadja moved to Paris, she became close to her grandmother, Josée, who lived on a houseboat on the Seine, the kind of woman who “was beautiful long after she was beautiful.” Josée had her own story to tell, and a pattern of mother-daughter resentment began to take shape, stretching back like matryoshka dolls through the decades. The author doesn’t elide the darker moments, such as abortions and suicide attempts—“these important parts of women’s experience that don’t make history,” as she puts it—not to mention the highly ambivalent figure of her grandfather, one of the first cosmetic plastic surgeons in France. The result, seven years in the writing, is both piercingly honest and uncommonly generous, allowing space for the vagaries of memory and different generational spins. For her grandmother, introspection was an impossible luxury; for her mother, seeing oneself as a victim could never be a position of strength.
If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion wrote of our efforts to impose meaning on the world, we mine and transfigure our lives to suit us—narration as a tool of survival. (Drawn to female authors, including Didion, Nadja cites Elena Ferrante, Karen Russell, and Helen Oyeyemi as current favorites.) And while time and memory have a way of reducing those who loom largest in our pasts to archetypes, Nadja, who continues to live in Paris and dates an Algerian woman, reminds us of memoir’s potential to complicate and humanize—and even, sometimes, spark a reconnection. “My mother and my grandmother are both very strong storytellers of their own lives and that's where their power comes from. Part of taking my place in that line of women was the understanding that none of these stories is more real than the other.” She considers the dessert menu, a twinkle in her eye. “I think we should order the madeleines.”
This is an expanded version of Megan O’Grady’s column in Vogue’s August issue.