Nadja Spiegelman is the 29-year-old daughter of Maus creator Art Spiegelman and New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly. Her extraordinary memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This, traces her maternal line back four generations and explores the fallibility of memory.
What prompted you to write about the unreliability of memory?
It was always something I was conscious of growing up. We spent so much time as a family fighting over our differing memories, from the minute details of what had happened during an argument the weekend before to the grander narrative that shaped our lives together. To see that play out between my mother and my grandmother’s memories was fascinating. One of my professors in college said that we must only write things that we are 100% certain are true. But when I began thinking about my family it just seemed like such an impossible task – there was nothing that could be agreed upon as true.
Your memoir is also a fascinating study of how patterns of behaviour are repeated by one generation after another…
I think in a lot of cultures there’s this psychological idea of the impacted family secret that keeps getting played out generation after generation until it’s suddenly revealed, and then future generations can be freed from it. That’s something that speaks to me. I had a strong desire to understand where my mother had come from and what she’d been like as a girl – and that really helped illuminate and lighten our relationship.
Your father documented his relationship with his own father in the Pulitzer prize-winning graphic novel Maus. Were you conscious of his fame growing up?
I was incredibly conscious of it in the sense that I felt that whatever I did with my life – whether it was artistic or not – would get compared to my father’s work. For a long time I didn’t want people to know who my father was, I didn’t want to be seen as his daughter. I was afraid that the things I achieved or the relationships I made would be somehow less authentic. In writing this book I found a way to reconcile both identities, and to acknowledge that my father’s book is part of what has shaped who I am.
Did being a character in Maus make you more aware of how you were portraying others in your memoir?
I’d like to think so, yes. The few times I did appear in my father’s work I felt very strongly as if something had been taken away from me. I think in some ways it made me very conscious of what it meant to write about someone else and in some ways it made me much more blind to it.
In what way blind?
Because I grew up with this idea that of course my grandparents were in a book, of course I could appear in a book. It seemed like a natural process to have people appear in your work.
How did your mother and grandmother react to your book?
The act of telling these stories changed our relationship. It eased things with my mother. But it wasn’t easy for her and my grandmother to see themselves represented through my work. They’re both self-made, powerful women who have their own storytelling force.
Your father hardly features at all in your memoir…
That is very intentional. I was more interested in following one straight matrilineal line and having the very subjective stories resonate with each other.
If your memoir was turned into a movie, who would you like to play the part of you?
It would be very interesting to have my mother try to play the part of me and see what happens.
You grew up in a family of storytellers, but which authors most influenced your own writing?
I read almost exclusively fiction. I really love James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Elizabeth Strout, Karen Russell. In nonfiction, I very much admire Rebecca Solnit.
What are you reading now? And what’s next on your reading list?
I’m reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, and I’m loving it. Next, I want to read Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
You’ve obviously grown up around a lot of famous authors. But which writers – dead or alive – would you have at your fantasy dinner party?
Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and George Saunders.
And which authors would you most like to be friends with?
There are so many! I think it’s difficult not to have a literary crush on Zadie Smith, especially when you see her eloquence and elegance in person. Also Annie Proulx, Karen Russell and Mavis Gallant – I would have loved to have been friends with her.
I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This is published by Text (£12.99). To order a copy for £10.65 click here
