Memoirist Nadja Spiegelman Pays Tribute to the Women in Her Family
If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, as Joan Didion wrote of our efforts to impose meaning on the world, we mine and transfigure our lives to suit us—narration as a tool of survival. (Drawn to female authors, including Didion, Nadja cites Elena Ferrante, Karen Russell, and Helen Oyeyemi as current favorites.) And while time and memory have a way of reducing those who loom largest in our pasts to archetypes, Nadja, who continues to live in Paris and dates an Algerian woman, reminds us of memoir’s potential to complicate and humanize—and even, sometimes, spark a reconnection. “My mother and my grandmother are both very strong storytellers of their own lives and that’s where their power comes from. Part of taking my place in that line of women was the understanding that none of these stories is more real than the other.” She considers the dessert menu, a twinkle in her eye. “I think we should order the madeleines.”