2021 Reading Challenge: A book featuring 3 generations (grandparent, parent, child)

I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This by Nadja Spiegelman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


4.5 stars

Nadja is the daughter of two famous people in the art world: Art Spiegelman, author of The Complete Maus, and Françoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker. But she always felt second best - an after thought at times. She decides to explore the life of the influential women in her life - her mother, her maternal grandmother and her maternal great-grandmother.

What she learns is that people remember events differently - often rewriting their own narrative to make themselves either the hero or the victim of the story. Along the way she learns of lives full of abuse, assault, gaslighting and denial.

But also she learns of lives that have shaped the person who shaped the person who shaped the person who shaped her.

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This was a deep and heavy book. I found myself deeply feeling for the different women and at the same time feeling very angry at them. And in a way it makes me wish I had had a chance to do with my mother and grandmother what Nadja was able to do with hers.



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