Twenty-nine-year-old Nadja Spiegelman's mother Françoise Mouly – the French-born art director of The New Yorker and children's publisher – was a formidable but unconventional caregiver.
She decried “timid women who washed their vegetables”, took her children (Spiegelman has a younger brother) swimming in the ocean during thunderstorms and made them eat dirt to build up their immune systems.
Luminous and magnetic, she held her offspring safely in a “force field” of love. As Spiegelman hit puberty, however, the dynamic between them abruptly shifted. Unconsciously, mother and daughter replayed scenes from Françoise’s own traumatic adolescence – the details of which Spiegelman eventually uncovered in her 20s when she interviewed her mother about her life before her emigration to the United States, marriage and motherhood.
As Françoise's narrative unspools, we're treated to the first indications that this is going to be a project of considerable astuteness. The crisp lucidity of American writer Spiegelman's prose in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This and the ease with which she flits between the present and the past; between the woman she's interviewing – described intimately as "my mother" – and the as-yet unknown girl this woman once was – the unfamiliar "Françoise" – disguises the intelligence and elegance she has employed in the intertwining of the two.
Françoise fled France to escape her family. Her beautiful but cruel mother Josée, her creepy father Paul – one of the country’s leading plastic surgeons, who cherishes an “unhealthy” attraction to his daughter – and her two siblings, with whom she was in constant competition.
It’s a remarkable story, but is made even more effective by just how seamlessly Spiegelman interlocks episodes from her mother’s past with memories of her own childhood.
Françoise lovingly bakes her family a lemon pie but the end result is inedible and everyone laughs at her efforts. “My mother’s mouth became very small as she told me this story,” Spiegelman says. “She cast her eyes downward, her voice hollow with hurt. I could see on her face the same expression she must have had that evening, the little girl under the thick eyeliner.”
To hear, immediately afterwards, that Spiegelman remembers her mother always relishing each and every slice of disgusting “cake” her children concocted from a mishmash of ingredients, finds its true meaning in this contrast. This, however, is not a straightforward story of good and bad. Juxtaposed with such examples of a mother par excellence are those that depict a very different woman. One who (falsely) accuses a daughter struggling with her weight of binge eating on the sly; who shrugs off her uncomfortable teenage cries for help; and often favours her brother.
From Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments (1987) and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club (1995), through Alison Bechdel's "comic drama" Are You My Mother? (2012), to Meghan Daum's searing essay Matricide (2014), agonisingly strained mother-daughter relationships have provided the raw material for some of the very best memoir ("mom-oir") writing.
Daum explains that the origins of her fraught relationship with her mother nestled in a previous generation of upset: “For my mother’s entire life, her mother was less a mother than splintered bits of shrapnel she carried around in her body; sharp, rusty debris that threatened to puncture an organ if she turned a certain way.”
When describing her mother in the present-day, Spiegelman depicts a woman who, although no longer in regular danger of being injured, clearly bears the scars of similar psychic shrapnel. This, however, is far from the end of the story. Having heard her mother’s version of events, the author decides to excavate further, relocating to Paris in her mid-twenties to spend time with her grandmother Josée.
What she hears is a different version of Françoise’s youth, a different account of Josée as a mother and a story of another troubled relationship: that between Josée and her mother Mina – a woman who bore her own pain and shame, including having her child out of traditional marriage and being jailed after the Second World War on charges of collaboration.
“I was the unwanted child, not her,” the aggrieved Josée protests, berating her daughter.
What elevates this already beautifully written, cleverly plotted prose narrative is the way in which Spiegelman doesn't just present the conflicting narratives she uncovers but rather she uses the moments where they clash to interrogate memory itself. Every memoirist worth their salt knows that their endeavour involves just as much storytelling as writing a piece of fiction – "If you're going to publish a memoir, it needs to work as a book," A M Homes, author of The Mistress's Daughter (2007), explains in Meredith Maran's Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature (2016).
But Spiegelman probes deeper, referring to the discoveries of neuroscience to establish the unreliability of memory. Once disturbed, she explains, long-term memories float unstably in our consciousness for a mere three hours before they slip back beneath the surface, “re-encode[d]” with new details added to fill in the blanks. Yet at the same time its intrinsic truthfulness – “There’s no psychological difference between what you experience and what you imagine,” Mouly informs her daughter, having read research on the topic.
Likening it to a physical violation, Spiegelman describes “the violence” of what she’s doing prying into her mother’s life like this. Then later, her father insightfully describes having a writer as kin as “like having a murderer in the family”.
He's referring, of course, not only to his daughter's actions but also his own, for, if you haven't already put two and two together, memoir writing is in Spiegelman's blood: her father is Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus, which told the story of his parents' experiences in Auschwitz and which is also dedicated to her.
“I’m doing something parallel and yet it’s completely different,” says his daughter, acknowledging the similarities between her and her father’s work – each tells the story of their parents’ past by means of a depiction of the interviews with the subject in question each author/offspring conducted.
As such, there’s a graceful symmetry between the two projects, and together they provide a full 360 degrees, panoramic portrait of a family and its heritage.
Any suspicions one might harbour of Spiegelman resting on the laurels of such an illustrious literary inheritance are immediately swept aside as you read her work. She proves herself more than worthy of comparison with her father, fully grasping the risks and the rewards of her chosen genre.
"I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else's story," she explains, having made appearances in Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), her father's book that processes his experiences of 9/11. And when it comes to her paternal grandparents, to her they "were a book," people she got to know "only in its pages".
I haven’t read a better memoir all year.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Sheer grandeur
The Owo building is 14 storeys high, seven of which are below ground, with the 30,000 square feet of amenities located subterranean, including a 16-seat private cinema, seven lounges, a gym, games room, treatment suites and bicycle storage.
A clear distinction between the residences and the Raffles hotel with the amenities operated separately.
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
Company%20profile
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EName%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20WallyGPT%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E2014%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFounders%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ESaeid%20and%20Sami%20Hejazi%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Dubai%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ESector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EFinTech%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestment%20raised%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E%247.1%20million%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ENumber%20of%20staff%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%2020%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestment%20stage%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EPre-seed%20round%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cyl turbo
Power: 201hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 320Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 6-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 8.7L/100km
Price: Dh133,900
On sale: now
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
COMPANY%20PROFILE
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EName%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ESmartCrowd%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E2018%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFounder%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ESiddiq%20Farid%20and%20Musfique%20Ahmed%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EDubai%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ESector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EFinTech%20%2F%20PropTech%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInitial%20investment%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E%24650%2C000%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ECurrent%20number%20of%20staff%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%2035%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestment%20stage%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ESeries%20A%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestors%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EVarious%20institutional%20investors%20and%20notable%20angel%20investors%20(500%20MENA%2C%20Shurooq%2C%20Mada%2C%20Seedstar%2C%20Tricap)%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Results
Men's finals
45kg:Duc Le Hoang (VIE) beat Zolfi Amirhossein (IRI) points 29-28. 48kg: Naruephon Chittra (THA) beat Joseph Vanlalhruaia (IND) TKO round 2.
51kg: Sakchai Chamchit (THA) beat Salam Al Suwaid (IRQ) TKO round 1. 54kg: Veerasak Senanue (THA) beat Huynh Hoang Phi (VIE) 30-25.
57kg: Almaz Sarsembekov (KAZ) beat Tak Chuen Suen (MAC) RSC round 3. 60kg: Yerkanat Ospan (KAZ) beat Ibrahim Bilal (UAE) 30-27.
63.5kg: Abil Galiyev (KAZ) beat Nouredine Samir (UAE) 29-28. 67kg: Narin Wonglakhon (THA) beat Mohammed Mardi (UAE) 29-28.
71kg: Amine El Moatassime (UAE) w/o Shaker Al Tekreeti (IRQ). 75kg: Youssef Abboud (LBN) w/o Ayoob Saki (IRI).
81kg: Ilyass Habibali (UAE) beat Khaled Tarraf (LBN) 29-28. 86kg: Ali Takaloo (IRI) beat Emil Umayev (KAZ) 30-27.
91kg: Hamid Reza Kordabadi (IRI) beat Mohamad Osaily (LBN) RSC round 1. 91-plus kg: Mohammadrezapoor Shirmohammad (IRI) beat Abdulla Hasan (IRQ) 30-27.
Women's finals
45kg: Somruethai Siripathum (THA) beat Ha Huu Huynh (VIE) 30-27. 48kg: Thanawan Thongduang (THA) beat Colleen Saddi (PHI) 30-27.
51kg: Wansawang Srila Or (THA) beat Thuy Phuong Trieu (VIE) 29-28. 54kg: Ruchira Wongsriwo (THA) beat Zeinab Khatoun (LBN) 30-26.
57kg: Sara Idriss (LBN) beat Zahra Nasiri Bargh (IRI) 30-27. 60kg: Kaewrudee Kamtakrapoom (THA) beat Sedigheh Hajivand (IRI) TKO round 2.
63.5kg: Nadiya Moghaddam (IRI) w/o Reem Al Issa (JOR).
Greatest of All Time
Starring: Vijay, Sneha, Prashanth, Prabhu Deva, Mohan
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now
Specs
Engine: Electric motor generating 54.2kWh (Cooper SE and Aceman SE), 64.6kW (Countryman All4 SE)
Power: 218hp (Cooper and Aceman), 313hp (Countryman)
Torque: 330Nm (Cooper and Aceman), 494Nm (Countryman)
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh158,000 (Cooper), Dh168,000 (Aceman), Dh190,000 (Countryman)
Bullet%20Train
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20David%20Leitch%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStars%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Brad%20Pitt%2C%20Aaron%20Taylor-Johnson%2C%20Brian%20Tyree%20Henry%2C%20Sandra%20Bullock%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%203%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
John%20Wick%3A%20Chapter%204
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Chad%20Stahelski%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EStars%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Keanu%20Reeves%2C%20Laurence%20Fishburne%2C%20George%20Georgiou%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E4%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The biog
Simon Nadim has completed 7,000 dives.
The hardest dive in the UAE is the German U-boat 110m down off the Fujairah coast.
As a child, he loved the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau
He also led a team that discovered the long-lost portion of the Ines oil tanker.
If you are interested in diving, he runs the XR Hub Dive Centre in Fujairah
Name: Peter Dicce
Title: Assistant dean of students and director of athletics
Favourite sport: soccer
Favourite team: Bayern Munich
Favourite player: Franz Beckenbauer
Favourite activity in Abu Dhabi: scuba diving in the Northern Emirates
