OUT TODAY: I'm Supposed To Protect You From All This by Nadja Spiegelman

‘Seven years in the writing, [I’m supposed To Protect You From All This] is both piercingly honest and uncommonly generous, allowing space for the vagaries of memory and different generational spins’   Vogue USA 

 'Nadja Spiegelman has written a richly detailed memoir about the contradictory life narratives that connect and divide four generations of women on her mother’s side.’ The New York Times

‘Spiegelman’s prose is witty, tender, assured and poetic…The unexpected symmetries between the generations, as well as the inevitable insults and pains, make this artful memoir feel like the story of every family.’ Sheila Heti, author of How Should A Person Be?

I’M SUPPOSED TO PROTECT YOU FROM ALL THIS

 NADJA SPIEGELMAN

Published today on 25 November by Text Publishing in trade paperback, priced at £12.99

A memoir of mothers and daughters, traced through generations, from Paris to New York and back again.

More than most Nadja Spiegelman’s father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and more than most mothers, hers—French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed and ‘began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand’, their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past. The weight of the difficult stories Françoise told her daughter shifted the balance between them. Nadja’s grandmother’s memories then contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own.

Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past and how sometimes those who love us best hurt us most. Readers will recognise themselves and their families in this moving, heart-breaking memoir.

Nadja Spiegelman has written three graphic novels for children. She grew up in New York City and now divides her time between Paris and Brooklyn.