BookPage Nonfiction Top Pick, August 2016

Nadja Spiegelman’s brilliant excavation into four generations of her maternal line is nothing short of astonishing. The daughter of Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Françoise Mouly (art director of The New Yorker), Spiegelman would have a compelling coming-of-age story to tell simply on the basis of her parentage and her upbringing among artists. I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This, however, is unusually sensitive to the transmission of family secrets and wounds between generations. Rather than tell the story of an individual daughter, this elegant, beautifully structured memoir tells the story of four generations of daughters locked in painful battle with their mothers. 

The focus of the narrative, at first, is the glamorous and frightening Mouly. Her sudden rages and overt favoring of her son over her daughter could—in other hands—be grounds for a revenge memoir. Her maternal cruelty, particularly concerning food and weight gain, is honestly depicted by her daughter. Despite these clearly painful experiences, Spiegelman’s drive is to understand her mother, not condemn her. Alternating chapters that focus on each woman’s adolescence show how both were targets for their mothers’ anger. In Mouly’s case, she fled from France to New York at age 18 to escape the mire of family life.

Spiegelman’s desire to learn the truth about her mother’s childhood takes her to Paris and her grandmother Josée, yet another strong-willed and sharp-tongued woman. As she pursues Josée’s childhood story, as well as her mother Mina’s story, she learns that certain patterns and connections have haunted each of these pairs of mothers and daughters, even when they recall events differently.

A meditation on memory and the nature of truth as much as a family history, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This introduces a stunning new voice in the field of memoir.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With seven generations of family secrets, two notable English country houses and multiple writers, England’s Sackville-West and Nicolson families have served as material for multiple memoirs. In A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations, Juliet Nicolson—daughter of Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West—takes her turn at the family trade. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as cabinets of old letters and diaries, Nicolson casts a gimlet eye on family stories extending back to her great-great-grandmother Pepita, the legendary Spanish dancer who entranced a young British diplomat, Lionel Sackville-West, into a passionate, illicit affair.

The patterns Nicolson observes in her family—ardent love affairs, maternal abandonment and the destructive effects of alcoholism—are fascinating in their repetition, showing how families do tend to repeat mistakes across generations. Nicolson’s familial dysfunctions are, however, particularly glamorous, as they involve naughty Victorians, runaway wives and aristocratic privilege.

Her great-grandmother’s life makes for particularly compelling reading, as the young Victoria travels to Washington, D.C. to set up a diplomat’s house for her grieving widower father (Lionel never married Pepita, but their children were legitimized by the family). Victoria’s flirtatiousness was legendary, resulting in a proposal from President Chester Arthur himself. After 14 proposals (at least), she was swept off her feet by a first cousin, named—like her father—Lionel Sackville-West. Her introduction to the “arts of love” is quite spicy, and the story gains much from Nicolson’s access to her own family’s papers.

The author’s elegant and balanced assessment of the women in her family focuses on marriage and domestic life, and a strain of unhappiness that tends to result in middle-aged alcoholic isolation after the fading of the glamour and beauty of their youth. Nicolson’s candor and realism make this legendary family accessible and sympathetic, and her book a compelling work of memoir.

In The Return, Libyan novelist Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) tells the harrowing story of his search for his father, Jaballa Matar. Early in Muammar Qaddafi’s regime, Jaballa served as a U.N. diplomat, but he was soon accused of criticizing Qaddafi and forced to flee to Cairo with his family. In 1990, while Matar was at university in London, Jaballa was kidnapped by Egyptian secret police and sent to Abu Salim prison in Tripoli.

Matar’s narrative roams through time, moving from his 2012 visit to see family in Tripoli and Benghazi after Qaddafi’s downfall (Matar’s first visit in 33 years), to the distant past—when his grandfather fought against the brutal Italian occupation of Libya. He recounts his efforts to gather scraps of information, meeting with former prisoners who might have seen Jaballa. 

At times, the memoir reads like a spy novel: In the 1980s, Qaddafi’s spies kept tabs not only on Jaballa but also on family members, following Matar’s brother when he was at boarding school. Decades later, Matar connected with Qaddafi’s “reformist” son Seif, who’d promised him an answer about what had happened to Jaballa. Seif put Matar through a series of phone calls and clandestine meetings in London hotels, mixing threats and compliments, meetings that ultimately proved fruitless.

The Return beautifully chronicles the vagaries of life as an exile and the grief of wondering about a father’s suffering. Yes, Matar’s memoir is sometimes bleak in describing the Qaddafi regime’s decades of bizarre repressive actions. But it also offers a portrait of a loving family and a needed window into Libya, not only its troubles but also its beauty, and the many kindnesses Matar encountered there.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.