Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir
    Unavailable
    I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir
    Audiobook11 hours

    I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir

    Written by Nadja Spiegelman

    Narrated by Nadja Spiegelman

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

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

    For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even 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, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. 

    It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled.  Her grandmother's memories 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 in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 2, 2016
    ISBN9780735205581
    Unavailable
    I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir

    Related to I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

    Related audiobooks

    Women's Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Three Movements

      Jun 6, 2017

      Three Movements
      6 min read

    • Article

      She Who Remembers

      Apr 5, 2022

      She Who Remembers
      10 min read

    • Article

      THE Reading room

      Oct 7, 2020

      THE Reading room
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Art of TheaterNo. 18

      Dec 1, 2020

      The Art of TheaterNo. 18
      39 min read

    • Article

      THE Reading room

      Oct 7, 2020

      THE Reading room
      3 min read

    • Article

      Michael Crummey

      Sep 3, 2020

      Michael Crummey
      5 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jun 30, 2021

      Africa has long been a source of inspiration for writers, so we asked our contributors to propose books that have meant something to them BY ERNEST HEMINGWAY This is embarrassing to say as a black man, but very few people have written about wild Afri

      3 min read

    • Article

      Foreign Affairs

      Dec 1, 2022

      Foreign Affairs
      24 min read

    • Article

      Me And Marie

      Dec 15, 2019

      Me And Marie
      3 min read

    • Article

      To Be In A State Of War

      Jul 6, 2023

      To Be In A State Of War
      15 min read

    • Article

      Where Is Black Life Lived?

      Jul 21, 2020

      Where Is Black Life Lived?
      6 min read

    • Article

      First

      Feb 16, 2022

      THE lobby of the Chase Park Plaza hotel in Saint Louis, with its glamourous chandeliers and elegant staircases, seems like an ideal place to meet Paul Tran. The poet walks in wearing one of their more casual looks: high-waisted joggers with a black,

      11 min read

    • Article

      It All Begins in Love

      Dec 1, 2023

      It All Begins in Love
      9 min read

    • Article

      Power Dressing

      Dec 8, 2023

      Power Dressing
      6 min read

    • Article

      Enter: The New Daughters Of Africa

      Feb 25, 2019

      What a joy to be introducing you to New Daughters of Africa. Enabling the anthology to be assembled in record time, writers not only came on board with enthusiasm and alacrity but often steered me in the direction of others whose work they admire. Al

      2 min read

    • Article

      Different Paths

      Oct 21, 2022

      Different Paths
      3 min read

    • Article

      UNDER the Umbrella

      Mar 27, 2018

      UNDER the Umbrella
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Teenager, Strangers And A Pair Of Apes

      Oct 26, 2023

      PERHAPS AS A FUNCTION OF MY OWN journey through middle age, I have become increasingly interested recently in late work. This is the writing that comes when a writer has passed what blurb-composers call “the peak of their powers”, but at the same tim

      5 min read

    • Article

      Victoria Mas On The Mad Women’s Ball: ‘My Book Is A Fiction... But Terrible Things Really Happened To Women In Paris 200 Years Ago’

      Jun 18, 2021

      In the opening pages of Victoria Mas’s debut novel, The Mad Women’s Ball, a 16-year-old girl is hypnotised by a 65-year-old man. “Shoulders back, bosom forward, head held high,” the girl walks proudly into a lecture theatre at the Pitié-Salpêtrière h

      7 min read

    • Article

      Books Only a Mother Could Love

      May 10, 2019

      Books Only a Mother Could Love
      5 min read

    Reviews for I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

    4/5

    15 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Author Nadja Spiegelman is the daughter of famous graphic novelist Art Spiegelman (Maus) and New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This is sort of a memoir/autobiography/biography of Nadja, her mother Françoise, her grandmother Josée, and her great-grandmother Mina, presented mostly as conversations about the subject’s memories of themselves and each other (Mina is no longer present but her life is described by her survivors). The narrators are unreliable; when Nadja does some fact-checking after a conversation she often finds events couldn’t have taken place as described. But the feelings come across as authentic even if the memories do not. The women have tough lives - they have to put up with cheating lovers, intolerant parents, rebellious children, economic deprivation, and the Second World War – yet they triumph magnificently over all this. There’s quite a bit of generational conflict; the older ladies sometimes have a hard time understand what the younger ones are up to – yet even if there’s a lack of understanding there’s amused acceptance. Not the kind of book I normally read, but interesting and endearing.
    • 5/5
      Die Geschichte ihrer Familie, genauer gesagt, die Geschichte ihrer Mutter und ihrer Großmutter hat Nadja schon immer fasziniert, zu viele weiße Stellen, Ungereimtheiten und unglaubliche Begebenheiten hat sie gehört, weshalb sie als Erwachsene beginnt, nachzufragen, zu forschen und sie aufzuschreiben. Entstanden ist das Bild einer Frau, die nie geliebt wurde, die Außenseiterin in der eigenen Familie war und früh die Flucht ergriffen hat. Doch es gibt auch eine andere Seite, die Geschichte der Großmutter, die ebenfalls unter ihrer eigenen exzentrischen Mutter gelitten hatte. Mehrere Generationen Frauen, die nie ausgesprochen haben, was geschehen war und sich nun in diesem Buch ihrer Vergangenheit stellen.Nadja Spiegelman ist die Tochter von Art Spiegelman, der seinerseits für „Maus“ den Pulitzer Prize gewonnen hat, einem Comic, der ebenfalls die Familiengeschichte erzählt. In diesem Kontext ist es nicht mehr ganz so verwunderlich, dass eine junge Frau eine doch schmerzliche Biographie ihrer Mutter vorlegt, die noch lebt und sich ihrer eigenen Geschichte stellen muss. Dadurch, dass Spiegelman die Lebensgeschichte mit ihrer eigenen verwebt, zeigt sie immer wieder Parallelen zwischen der Vergangenheit und der Gegenwart auf, die auch durch unterschiedliche Länder und Zeiten stabil sind.Vieles in Spiegelmans Familiengeschichte ist auch für den Leser schmerzlich und man fragt sich, wie Familienmitglieder auf diese Weise miteinander umgehen können. Vor allem das wiederkehrende Motiv der Mütter, ihre Töchter auf ihr Aussehen und ihre Essgewohnheiten zu reduzieren ist augenfällig. Auch die Dichotomie zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Privatheit, wenn es um den Körper geht, fand ich eher seltsam gelöst in der Familie, was auch zu erheblicher Unsicherheit der jungen Frauen führte. Vor allem Françoise leidet unter der Ablehnung und fehlenden Zuneigung ihrer Mutter. Die ältere Schwester wurde immer bevorzugt, was die jüngere durch extreme Leistungen versucht zu kompensieren, um so Aufmerksamkeit zu erringen. Ein weiterer Aspekt der Erzählung schwebt über dem gesamten Bericht und stellt vieles immer wieder in Frage: wie historisch korrekt sind die Erinnerungen, die die Menschen haben? Haben sich die Ereignisse wirklich so zugetragen oder wird durch die Zeit und die eigene perspektive das Erlebte verfälscht und fügt sich zu einem stimmigen Bild, das womöglich gar nicht der Realität entspricht? Immer wieder steht Nadja vor diesem Problem: Einzelne Aspekte passen zeitlich und örtlich nicht, das Gesamtbild ist nicht stimmig und Mutter und Großmutter erinnern dasselbe Ereignis gänzlich verschieden. An dieser Stelle stritt Erzählen an Erinnern – dies kann versöhnen und das eigene Leben für die jeweilige Person erträglicher machen.