Nadja Spiegelman on forgiving, understanding and deconstructing her mother

Nadja Spiegelman is no stranger to having her life artfully examined. 

As the daughter of Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker - Nadja's family history is already well documented.

But Nadja has always felt that parts of the story were missing.

So now their lives are the subject of her writing. 

She joins guest host Gill Deacon today to discuss her new memoir 'I'm Supposed To Protect You From All This,' an uncomfortable, relatable and universal look into her life. 

At the centre of Nadja's memoir is her relationship with her mother,someone "we feel we know best in the world and yet, is often the person we know the least."

On the stories we construct

According to Spiegelman, we make ourselves and each other up as we live and grow. But, she says "the way we talk about the past changes the past."

She set out in her writing to forgive her mother. Instead, she and her mother came to an understanding. The result? "Impossible closeness." 

Along the way, she heard the harrowing and difficult details of her mother and grandmother's pasts.

"These stories about women that I love…These are the stories of women that so rarely make history and yet make up so much of history. The moments when we both lose and try to gain control of our bodies… when we try to turn femininity in something that makes us powerful rather than makes us vulnerable."