Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
Roz Chast, 2014
Bloomsbury
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608198061
Summary
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast’s memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”—with predictable results—the tools that had served Roz well through her parents’ seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed.
While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies—an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades—the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast’s talent as cartoonist and storyteller. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 26, 1954
• Raised—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut
Rosalind "Roz" Chast is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker.
Education
She is a graduate of Midwood High School in Brooklyn and first attended Kirkland College (now Hamilton College), and then studied at the Rhode Island School of Design where she received a BFA in painting in 1977.
Career
Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes—often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper—to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects," an expression she credits to her mother.
Her first New Yorker cartoon showed a small collection of "Little Things," strangely named, oddly shaped small objects such as "chent," "spak," and "tiv". Chast's drawing style shuns conventional craft in her figure drawing, perspective, shading, etc.; this approach is similar to that of several other female cartoonists, notably Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry. A significant part of the humor in Chast's cartoons appears in the background and the corners of the frames.
Her New Yorker cartoons began as small black-and-white panels, but increasingly she has been using color and her work now often appears over several pages. Her first cover for The New Yorker was on August 4, 1986, showing a lecturer in a white coat pointing to a family tree of ice cream.
Chast's subjects often deal with domestic and family life. In a 2006 interview with comedian Steve Martin for the New Yorker Festival, Chast revealed that she enjoys drawing interior scenes—often involving lamps and accentuated wall paper—to serve as the backdrop for her comics. Her comics reflect a "conspiracy of inanimate objects," an expression she credits to her mother.
She is represented by the Danese/Corey gallery in Chelsea, New York City. She lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut with her husband, humor writer Bill Franzen.
Books
In addition to her 2014 family memoir, Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Chast has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including Unscientific Americans, Parallel Universes, Mondo Boxo, Proof of Life on Earth, The Four Elements, and The Party After You Left: Collected Cartoons 1995–2003 (Bloomsbury, 2004).
In 2006, Theories of Everything: Selected Collected and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978–2006 was published, collecting most of her cartoons from The New Yorker and other periodicals. One characteristic of her books is that the "author photo" is always a cartoon she draws (presumably) of herself. The title page is also hand-lettered by Chast, even including the Library of Congress cataloging information. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/25/2014.)
Awards/Honors
2013 - Inducted into American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Reuben Award for Best Gag Cartoon
2012 - New York City Literary Award for Humor
2004 - Art Festival Award, Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art
Honorary Doctorates: 2011, Dartmouth College; 2010, Art Institute of Boston; 1998, Pratt Institute. ("Awards/Honors" from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Ms. Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture ordinary crises in ordinary American lives.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Very, very, very funny, in a way that a straight-out memoir about the death of one’s elderly parents probably would not be.... Ambitious, raw and personal as anything she has produced.
Alex Witchel - New York Times Book Review
[O]ne of the best memoirs on mortality I’ve ever read, let alone about the difficult specifics of eldercare....an achievement of dark humor that rings utterly true. There is Chast’s gifted ear for the shorthanded, idiosyncratic dialogue that every family develops only over long years.... Mostly, though, this is the humor-leavened portrait of a family saying its long goodbyes, awkwardly and glancingly and painfully, muddling through in the most human of ways.
Washington Post
Better than any book I know, this extraordinarily honest, searing and hilarious graphic memoir captures (and helps relieve) the unbelievable stress that results when the tables turn and grown children are left taking care of their parents.... [A] remarkable, poignant memoir.
San Francisco Chronicle
Devastatingly good.... Anyone who has had Chast’s experience will devour this book and cling to it for truth, humor, understanding, and the futile wish that it could all be different.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Gut-wrenching and laugh-aloud funny. I want to recommend it to everyone I know who has elderly parents, or might have them someday.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
One of the major books of 2014.... Moving and bracingly candid.... This is, in its original and unexpected way, one of the great autobiographical memoirs of our time.
Buffalo News
A tour de force of dark humor and illuminating pathos about her parents’ final years as only this quirky genius of pen and ink could construe them.
Elle
(Starred review.) [P]oignant and funny.... Despite the subject matter, the book is frequently hilarious...a homage that provides cathartic “you are not alone” support to those caring for aging parents.... [A] cartoon memoir to laugh and cry, and heal, with—Roz Chast’s masterpiece.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Chast's scratchy art turns out perfectly suited to capturing the surreal realities of the death process. In quirky color cartoons, handwritten text, photos, and her mother's poems, she documents the unpleasant yet sometimes hilarious cycle of human doom. the inevitable.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Revelatory.… So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers’ appreciation of Chast and her work.
Kirkus Reviews
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