When MetaMaus, a companion to Maus – Art Spiegelman’s celebrated graphic memoir of the devastation wrought on his family by the Holocaust – was published in 2011, it included interviews with his wife, Françoise Mouly, and their children, Nadja and Dashiell. Nadja’s came first in the sequence, and began with her memory of being, aged around five, with her father in a Chinese restaurant, shortly after Maus had won the Pulitzer prize. She recounts how, after proudly telling this news to the waiter, she was scolded for bragging and felt shame, and embarrassment. “I never volunteer information about who my dad is now,” she says. A remembered injury, however long in the past, can inhibit and wound its recipient seemingly out of all proportion.
But the book is also about owning stories – almost invariably a charged business, and in the Mouly-Spiegelman household, strikingly so. “Instead of anecdotes,” Nadja writes, “we had narratives”, and their details were forever scrapped over and horse-traded. It is this process that powers her memoir, which focuses not on her father’s family, but on her mother’s. There is a vital connection to Maus – just as Art interviewed his father, so Nadja interviews her mother and grandmother. Her memoir is also crucially different, because her mother’s family tree has not been stripped bare by atrocity.
But these lives have not been plain sailing, either. Françoise loomed in her daughter’s life as a figure of fearlessness, a combination of domestic powerhouse and professional high-flier (she has been the art editor of the New Yorker since 1993, and a prolific publisher of children’s books and graphic magazines). She was also an adventurer, likely to grab her small children by the hand and run with them into a storm-hit Brazilian ocean. Scornful of risk, she “disdained most dangers as American constructs, invented by timid women who washed their vegetables”.
When Nadja confided that her maternal grandfather, once a cosmetic surgeon, had touched her breasts and her stomach, and stroked her bottom when he thought she was sleeping, her mother replied that “he’s just used to touching women”. When the subject resurfaces a few years later, Françoise is horrified and backs Art’s decision to cut him out of their lives. Nadja recalls recording her arguments with her mother in her childhood diary, and marking with them an encircled capital “R”, to reassure herself that they were real. She also reports Françoise’s remark to friends, who enquired how Nadja’s memoir is going, that it’s “a little like being on death row, awaiting my lethal injection”.
Throughout, there is a sense of the danger and potential destructiveness of contested memory, which intensifies when Nadja widens her investigations to include her French grandmother, Josée, who occupies a houseboat on the Seine. Unsurprisingly, many of Françoise’s attributes that Nadja struggled with – the imperviousness to her daughter’s upset, the lightning changes in mood – reveal themselves as a form of learned or inherited behaviour. Exceptionally serious episodes – nervous breakdown, an unwillingly undertaken abortion, rape, self-harm, suicide attempts – stud the book. They are punctuated by much less grave events, such as the story of a lemon pie, made by Françoise as a child during a skiing holiday and remembered as so impenetrable her father called for a saw to cut it up. Except, no, Josée insists, decades later, the story doesn’t end with a saw, it ends with an avalanche. You begin to see the problem.
But differing accounts of shared history are meat and drink to memoirists, and surely so universal as to be unremarkable. There has to be something else going on for us to want to read further. So what is Spiegelman’s point? In an extremely mazy, meandering narrative, in which reaches into the past often seem tenuous, the answer is surely not in establishing the literal truth. Rather, her subject appears to be – as Françoise says, almost in passing – the impossibility of feeling anger towards one’s mother, and the extent to which to do so would require a belief in potential change. Is it better, though, to accept that love and anger can co-exist; and that, particularly in mother-daughter relationships, such dynamics and dramas are frequently played out in the body, in attitudes towards lovers, food, appearance? Nadja cannot answer these questions definitively – who could? – but she can pose them arrestingly and illuminatingly. Her book leaves one in little doubt that she is both her mother’s and her father’s daughter.
- I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman (Text Publishing Company, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.40, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
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